Related papers: Robust Scaling in Human Brain Dynamics Despite Lat…
The critical brain hypothesis posits that neural systems operate near a phase transition, optimizing the processing of information. While scale invariance and non-Gaussian dynamics--hallmarks of criticality--have been observed in brain…
From 1/f noise to neuronal avalanches, evidence of scaling in brain activity has been increasingly linked to tuning to or near criticality. The concept of scaling is intimately related to the renormalization group (RG), in essence providing…
The brain is in a state of perpetual reverberant neural activity, even in the absence of specific tasks or stimuli. Shedding light on the origin and functional significance of such a dynamical state is essential to understanding how the…
The critical brain hypothesis posits that neural circuitry operates near criticality to reap the computational benefits of accessing a wide range of timescales. The theory of critical phenomena generally predicts heavy-tailed (power-law)…
Multiple studies of neural avalanches across different data modalities led to the prominent hypothesis that the brain operates near a critical point. The observed exponents often indicate the mean-field directed-percolation universality…
Large-scale recordings of neuronal activity make it possible to gain insights into the collective activity of neural ensembles. It has been hypothesized that neural populations might be optimized to operate at a 'thermodynamic critical…
We describe a chain of unidirectionally coupled adaptive excitable elements slowly driven by a stochastic process from one end and open at the other end, as a minimal toy model of unresolved irreducible uncertainty in a system performing…
Neural circuits are able to perform computations under very diverse conditions and requirements. The required computations impose clear constraints on their fine-tuning: a rapid and maximally informative response to stimuli in general…
It is widely accepted that the brain operates near a critical state, characterized by neural avalanches that follow power-law distributions. However, the functional rationale for why neural systems attain criticality remains unclear. Here,…
The human brain exhibits a complex structure made of scale-free highly connected modules loosely interconnected by weaker links to form a small-world network. These features appear in healthy patients whereas neurological diseases often…
Neural systems process information in a dynamical regime between silence and chaotic dynamics. This has lead to the criticality hypothesis which suggests that neural systems reach such a state by self-organizing towards the critical point…
We apply the phenomenological renormalization group to resting-state fMRI time series of brain activity in a large population. By recursively coarse-graining the data, we compute scaling exponents for the series variance, log probability of…
Self-organized criticality has been proposed to be a universal mechanism for the emergence of scale-free dynamics in many complex systems, and possibly in the brain. While such scale-free patterns were identified experimentally in many…
The observation of apparent power-laws in neuronal systems has led to the suggestion that the brain is at, or close to, a critical state and may be a self-organised critical system. Within the framework of self-organised criticality a…
The hierarchical organization of the brain is a fundamental structural principle, while brain criticality is a leading hypothesis for its collective dynamics. However, the connection between structure and signatures of criticality remains…
Understanding the activity of large populations of neurons is difficult due to the combinatorial complexity of possible cell-cell interactions. To reduce the complexity, coarse-graining had been previously applied to experimental neural…
Information processing in complex systems is often found to be maximally efficient close to critical states associated with phase transitions. It is therefore conceivable that also neural information processing operates close to…
The observation of critical-like behavior in cortical networks represents a major step forward in elucidating how the brain manages information. Understanding the origin and functionality of critical-like dynamics, as well as their…
Much evidence seems to suggest cortex operates near a critical point, yet a single set of exponents defining its universality class has not been found. In fact, when critical exponents are estimated from data, they widely differ across…
Many studies have found evidence that the brain operates at a critical point, a processus known as self-organized criticality. A recent paper found remarkable scalings suggestive of criticality in systems as different as neural cultures,…