Related papers: The brain near the edge
We consider the implications of the mathematical analysis of neurone-to-neurone dynamical complex networks. We show how the dynamical behaviour of small scale strongly connected networks lead naturally to non-binary information processing…
Self-organized criticality is a well-established phenomenon, where a system dynamically tunes its structure to operate on the verge of a phase transition. Here, we show that the dynamics inside the self-organized critical state are…
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…
It has long been suggested that the biological brain operates at some critical point between two different phases, possibly order and chaos. Despite many indirect empirical evidence from the brain and analytical indication on simple neural…
Empirical evidence suggesting that living systems might operate in the vicinity of critical points, at the borderline between order and disorder, has proliferated in recent years, with examples ranging from spontaneous brain activity to…
Oscillatory activities are widely observed in specific frequency bands of recorded field potentials in different brain regions, and play critical roles in processing neural information. Understanding the structure of these oscillatory…
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…
In many body systems, constituents interact with each other, forming a recursive pattern of mutual interaction and giving rise to many interesting phenomena. Based upon concepts of the modern many body theory, a model for a generic many…
Considering the very large body of knowledge which neuroimaging has put at our fingertips over the last three decades we looked at the brain with a fresh view which could unveil those 'old' things in new ways, in a framework which could…
The cognitive functions of human and non-human primates rely on the dynamic interplay of distributed neural assemblies. As such, it seems unlikely that cognition can be supported by macroscopic brain dynamics at the proximity 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…
This article questions the widespread assumption that there are brain representations that will always remain unconscious in the sense of being inaccessible to individual awareness under any circumstances. This implies that some part of the…
Dynamical criticality has been shown to enhance information processing in dynamical systems, and there is evidence for self-organized criticality in neural networks. A plausible mechanism for such self-organization is activity dependent…
In a recent paper, Bassett et al. (2011) have analyzed the static and dynamic organization of functional brain networks in humans. We here focus on the first claim made in this paper, which states that the static modular structure of such…
This paper proposes an explanation of the cognitive change that occurs as the creative process proceeds. During the initial, intuitive phase, each thought activates, and potentially retrieves information from, a large region containing many…
Social movements, neurons in the brain or even industrial suppliers are best described by agents evolving on networks with basic interaction rules. In these real systems, the connectivity between agents corresponds to the a critical state…
We all are fascinated by the phenomena of intelligent behavior, as generated both by our own brains and by the brains of other animals. As physicists we would like to understand if there are some general principles that govern the structure…
Humans display a tendency to pay more attention to bad outcomes, often in a disproportionate way relative to their statistical occurrence. They also display euphorism, as well as a preference for the current state of affairs (status quo…
Naturalistic animal behavior exhibits a strikingly complex organization in the temporal domain, whose variability stems from at least three sources: hierarchical, contextual, and stochastic. What are the neural mechanisms and computational…
Neural networks with equal excitatory and inhibitory feedback show high computational performance. They operate close to a critical point characterized by the joint activation of large populations of neurons. Yet, in macaque motor cortex we…