Related papers: The brain near the edge

The brain criticality hypothesis has largely only characterized brain dynamics in terms of their self-similarity, although experimental evidence suggests that the brain exhibits significant multifractality. To understand how multifractality…

As a person learns a new skill, distinct synapses, brain regions, and circuits are engaged and change over time. In this paper, we develop methods to examine patterns of correlated activity across a large set of brain regions. Our goal is…

Adaptive behavior is mainly the result of adaptive brains. We go a step beyond and claim that the brain does not only adapt to its surrounding reality but rather, it builds itself up to constructs its own reality. That is, rather than just…

In these notes we review emergent phenomena in complex systems, emphasizing ways to identify potential underlying universal mechanisms that generates complexity. The discussion is centered around the emergence of collective behavior in…

Adolescence is marked by rapid development of executive function. Mounting evidence suggests that executive function in adults may be driven by dynamic control of neurophysiological processes. Yet, how these dynamics evolve over adolescence…

Criticality, observed during second-order phase transitions, is an emergent phenomenon. The brain operates near criticality, where complex systems exhibit high correlations. The critical brain hypothesis suggests that the brain becomes an…

The extraordinary computational power of the brain may be related in part to the fact that each of the smaller neural networks that compose it can behave transiently in many different ways, depending on its inputs. Mathematically, input…

The presence of both critical behavior and oscillating patterns in brain dynamics is a very interesting issue. In this paper, we consider a model for a neuron population, where each neuron is modeled by an over-damped rotator. We find that…

Oscillatory synchrony is hypothesized to support the flow of information between brain regions, with different phase-locked configurations enabling activation of different effective interactions. Along these lines, past work has proposed…

A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…

The brain forms and stores distributed representations from sparse external input that compete for neuronal resources with already stored memory traces. It is unclear what dynamical properties of neural systems allow formation and…

Neural spikes in the brain form stochastic sequences, i.e., belong to the class of pulse noises. This stochasticity is a counterintuitive feature because extracting information - such as the commonly supposed neural information of mean…

Network control theory has recently emerged as a promising approach for understanding brain function and dynamics. By operationalizing notions of control theory for brain networks, it offers a fundamental explanation for how brain dynamics…

The complexity of neural dynamics stems in part from the complexity of the underlying anatomy. Yet how the organization of white matter architecture constrains how the brain transitions from one cognitive state to another remains unknown.…

We present a new paradigm in the study of brain mental dynamics on the basis of the stable transient activity neural networks observed in experiments. This new approach is in contrast to traditional system analysis usually adopted in…

In this work we challenge the main conclusions of Gu et al work (Controllability of structural brain networks. Nature communications 6, 8414, doi:10.1038/ncomms9414, 2015) on brain controllability. Using the same methods and analyses on…

In a many body system, constituents interact with each other, forming a recursive pattern of interaction and giving rise to many interesting phenomena. Based upon concepts of the modern many body theory, a model for a generic many body…

The principle of self-organization has acquired a fundamental significance in the newly emerging field of computational philosophy. Self-organizing systems have been described in various domains in science and philosophy including physics,…

We propose that a regulation mechanism based on Hebbian covariance plasticity may cause the brain to operate near criticality. We analyze the effect of such a regulation on the dynamics of a network with excitatory and inhibitory neurons…

The critical brain hypothesis states that there are information processing advantages for neuronal networks working close to the critical region of a phase transition. If this is true, we must ask how the networks achieve and maintain this…