Related papers: The brain near the edge
Even during fixation the human eye is constantly in low amplitude motion, jittering over small angles in random directions at up to 100Hz. This motion results in all features of the image on the retina constantly traversing a number of…
Human brain dynamics can be profitably viewed through the lens of statistical mechanics, where neurophysiological activity evolves around and between local attractors representing preferred mental states. Many physically-inspired models of…
Conventional neuroimaging analyses have revealed the computational specificity of localized brain regions, exploiting the power of the subtraction technique in fMRI and event-related potential analyses in EEG. Moving beyond this convention,…
Some biological systems operate at the critical point between stability and instability and this requires a fine-tuning of parameters. We bring together two examples from the literature that illustrate this: neural integration in the…
Anatomic connections between brain areas affect information flow between neuronal circuits and the synchronization of neuronal activity. However, such structural connectivity does not coincide with effective connectivity, related to the…
Statistical mechanics determines the abundance of different arrangements of matter depending on cost-benefit balances. Its formalism and phenomenology percolate throughout biological processes and set limits to effective computation. Under…
The functioning of an organ such as the brain emerges from interactions between its constituent parts. Further, this interaction is not immutable in time but rather unfolds in a succession of patterns, thereby allowing the brain to adapt to…
When the human brain manifests the birth of organised communication among local and large-scale neuronal populations activity remains undescribed. We report, in resting-state EEG source-estimates of 100 infants at term age, the existence of…
Evidence of critical dynamics has been recently found in both experiments and models of large scale brain dynamics. The understanding of the nature and features of such critical regime is hampered by the relatively small size of the…
The brain did not develop a dedicated device for reasoning. This fact bears dramatic consequences. While for perceptuo-motor functions neural activity is shaped by the input's statistical properties, and processing is carried out at high…
Synchronous oscillatory dynamics is frequently observed in the human brain. We analyze the fine temporal structure of phase-locking in a realistic network model and match it with the experimental data from parkinsonian patients. We show…
Cortical neurons whose activity is recorded in behavioral experiments has been classified into several types such as stimulus-related neurons, delay-period neurons, and reward-related neurons. Moreover, the population activity of neurons…
The human brain's computational prowess emerges not despite but because of its inherent "non-ideal factors"-noise, heterogeneity, structural irregularities, decentralized plasticity, systemic errors, and chaotic dynamics-challenging…
Functional networks provide a topological description of activity patterns in the brain, as they stem from the propagation of neural activity on the underlying anatomical or structural network of synaptic connections. This latter is well…
Networks in nature do not act in isolation but instead exchange information, and depend on each other to function properly. An incipient theory of Networks of Networks have shown that connected random networks may very easily result in…
Flexible modulation of temporal dynamics in neural sequences underlies many cognitive processes. For instance, we can adaptively change the speed of motor sequences and speech. While such flexibility is influenced by various factors such as…
Dynamic instability in the cytoskeleton underlies a great many vital cellular processes. In neurons, it is thought to play a role in information processing and the establishment of synaptic connections. It is from this interneuronal…
In the ecological approach to perception and action, information that specifies affordances is available in the energy arrays surrounding organisms, and this information is detected by organisms in order to perceptually guide their actions.…
Cortical neurons exhibit a hierarchy of timescales across brain regions in response to input stimuli, which is thought to be crucial for information processing of different temporal scales. Modeling studies suggest that both intra-regional…
Here we numerically study a model of excitable media, namely, a network with occasionally quiet nodes and connection weights that vary with activity on a short-time scale. Even in the absence of stimuli, this exhibits unstable dynamics,…