Related papers: Maximum entropy models of neuronal populations at …
Scale-invariant neuronal avalanches have been observed in cell cultures and slices as well as anesthetized and awake brains, suggesting that the brain operates near criticality, i.e. within a narrow margin between avalanche propagation and…
It has recently been reported that statistical signatures of brain criticality, obtained from distributions of neuronal avalanches, can depend on the cortical state. We revisit these claims with a completely different and independent…
Thermodynamic criticality describes emergent phenomena in a wide variety of complex systems. In the mammalian brain, the complex dynamics that spontaneously emerge from neuronal interactions have been characterized as neuronal avalanches, a…
Spontaneous neuronal activity is a ubiquitous feature of cortex. Its spatiotemporal organization reflects past input and modulates future network output. Here we study whether a particular type of spontaneous activity is generated by a…
Observations of power laws in neural activity data have raised the intriguing notion that brains may operate in a critical state. One example of this critical state is "avalanche criticality," which has been observed in various systems,…
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…
In this work, we report the preliminary analysis of the electrophysiological behavior of in vitro neuronal networks to identify when the networks are in a critical state based on the size distribution of network-wide avalanches of activity.…
Recent experimental observations have supported the hypothesis that the cerebral cortex operates in a dynamical regime near criticality, where the neuronal network exhibits a mixture of ordered and disordered patterns. However, A…
Complex systems, when poised near a critical point of a phase transition between order and disorder, exhibit a dynamics comprising a scale-free mixture of order and disorder which is universal, i.e. system-independent (1-5). It allows…
Cascading large-amplitude bursts in neural activity, termed avalanches, are thought to provide insight into the complex spatially distributed interactions in neural systems. In human neuroimaging, for example, avalanches occurring during…
Neuronal avalanches are a novel mode of activity in neuronal networks, experimentally found in vitro and in vivo, and exhibit a robust critical behaviour: These avalanches are characterized by a power law distribution for the size and…
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…
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…
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…
Avalanches of electrochemical activity in brain networks have been empirically reported to obey scale-invariant behavior --characterized by power-law distributions up to some upper cut-off-- both in vitro and in vivo. Elucidating whether…
In this paper we study a simple model of a purely excitatory neural network that, by construction, operates at a critical point. This model allows us to consider various markers of criticality and illustrate how they should perform in a…
The idea that information-processing systems operate near criticality to enhance computational performance is supported by scaling signatures in brain activity. However, external signals raise the question of whether this behavior is…
The existence of power-law distributions is only a first requirement in the validation of the critical behavior of a system. Long-range spatio-temporal correlations are fundamental for the spontaneous neuronal activity to be the expression…
It has long been argued that neural networks have to establish and maintain a certain intermediate level of activity in order to keep away from the regimes of chaos and silence. Strong evidence for criticality has been observed in terms of…
Networks of living neurons exhibit an avalanche mode of activity, experimentally found in organotypic cultures. Here we present a model based on self-organized criticality and taking into account brain plasticity, which is able to reproduce…