Related papers: The brain near the edge
Metastability, characterized by a variability of regimes in time, is a ubiquitous type of neural dynamics. It has been formulated in many different ways in the neuroscience literature, however, which may cause some confusion. In this…
Criticality is hypothesized as a physical mechanism underlying efficient transitions between cortical states and remarkable information processing capacities in the brain. While considerable evidence generally supports this hypothesis,…
This work concerns a many-body deterministic model that displays life-like properties as emergence, complexity, self-organization, spontaneous compartmentalization, and self-regulation. The model portraits the dynamics of an ensemble of…
Graph theory is now becoming a standard tool in system-level neuroscience. However, endowing observed brain anatomy and dynamics with a complex network structure does not entail that the brain actually works as a network. Asking whether the…
Natural animal behavior displays rich lexical and temporal dynamics, even in a stable environment. This implies that behavioral variability arises from sources within the brain, but the origin and mechanics of these processes remain largely…
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,…
Cognitive control is a suite of processes that helps individuals pursue goals despite resistance or uncertainty about what to do. Although cognitive control has been extensively studied as a dynamic feedback loop of perception, valuation,…
Understanding how the brain learns to compute functions reliably, efficiently and robustly with noisy spiking activity is a fundamental challenge in neuroscience. Most sensory and motor tasks can be described as dynamical systems and could…
A hallmark of human intelligence is the ability to adapt to new situations, by applying learned rules to new content (systematicity) and thereby enabling an open-ended number of inferences and actions (generativity). Here, we propose that…
In a manner similar to the molecular chaos that underlies the stable thermodynamics of gases, neuronal system may exhibit microscopic instability in individual neuronal dynamics while a macroscopic order of the entire population possibly…
It has been said that complexity lies between order and disorder. In the case of brain activity, and physiology in general, complexity issues are being considered with increased emphasis. We sought to identify features of brain organization…
This paper attempts to make feasible the evolutionary emergence of novelty in a supposedly deterministic world which behavior is associated with those of the mathematical dynamical systems. The work was motivated by the observation of…
A major unresolved question in Neuroscience is: What is the origin of the observed scale-invariant correlations in neural activity? Many researchers support the ``criticality hypothesis,'' which proposes that the brain operates near…
The brain is often called a computer and likened to a Turing machine, in part because the mind can manipulate discrete symbols such as numbers. But the brain is a dynamical system, more like a Watt governor than a Turing machine. Can a…
Nearly-elastic model systems with one or two degrees of freedom are considered: the system is undergoing a small loss of energy in each collision with the "wall". We show that instabilities in this purely deterministic system lead to…
Systems that exhibit complex behaviours are often found in a particular dynamical condition, poised between order and disorder. This observation is at the core of the so-called criticality hypothesis, which states that systems in a…
Brain rhythms contribute to every aspect of brain function. Here, we study critical and resonance phenomena that precede the emergence of brain rhythms. Using an analytical approach and simulations of a cortical circuit model of neural…
The brain is an assembly of neuronal populations interconnected by structural pathways. Brain activity is expressed on and constrained by this substrate. Therefore, statistical dependencies between functional signals in directly connected…
Current advances in neurosciences deal with the functional architecture of the central nervous system, paving the way for holistic theories that improve our understanding of brain activity. From topology, a strong concept comes into play in…
Redundancy is a ubiquitous property of the nervous system. This means that vastly different configurations of cellular and synaptic components can enable the same neural circuit functions. However, until recently very little brain disorder…