Emergent complex neural dynamics

Abstract

A large repertoire of spatiotemporal activity patterns in the brain is the basis for adaptive behaviour. Understanding the mechanism by which the brain's hundred billion neurons and hundred trillion synapses manage to produce such a range of cortical configurations in a flexible manner remains a fundamental problem in neuroscience. One plausible solution is the involvement of universal mechanisms of emergent complex phenomena evident in dynamical systems poised near a critical point of a second-order phase transition. We review recent theoretical and empirical results supporting the notion that the brain is naturally poised near criticality, as well as its implications for better understanding of the brain.

References in corpus (5)

• Scale-free brain functional networks
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• Does the 1/f frequency-scaling of brain signals reflect self-organized critical states?
• Critical phenomena in atmospheric precipitation
• Self-similar correlation function in brain resting-state fMRI

Cited by in corpus (14)

• Enhanced repertoire of brain dynamical states during the psychedelic experience
• Dynamical criticality in the collective activity of a population of retinal neurons
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• Can scale-freeness offset delayed signal detection in neuronal networks?
• Signal integration enhances the dynamic range in neuronal systems
• Fractional calculus ties the microscopic and macroscopic scales of complex network dynamics
• Equivalent dynamical complexity in a many-body quantum and collective human system
• A power-law distribution of phase-locking intervals does not imply critical interaction
• Rounding of abrupt phase transitions in brain networks
• Impact of noise and damage on collective dynamics of scale-free neuronal networks
• Network algorithmics and the emergence of information integration in cortical models
• On the dynamics of bubbles in boiling water
• A few points suffice: Efficient large-scale computation of brain voxel-wise functional connectomes from a sparse spatio-temporal point-process
• Point process analysis of large-scale brain fMRI dynamics