Self-organized criticality in single neuron excitability

Abstract

We present experimental and theoretical arguments, at the single neuron level, suggesting that neuronal response fluctuations reflect a process that positions the neuron near a transition point that separates excitable and unexcitable phases. This view is supported by the dynamical properties of the system as observed in experiments on isolated cultured cortical neurons, as well as by a theoretical mapping between the constructs of self organized criticality and membrane excitability biophysics.

5 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Power-law distributions in empirical data
• Emergent complex neural dynamics
• Does the 1/f frequency-scaling of brain signals reflect self-organized critical states?
• Scaling law for the transient behavior of type-II neuron models

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Colloquium: Criticality and dynamical scaling in living systems
• Cellular function given parametric variation: excitability in the Hodgkin-Huxley model
• Coexistence of critical sensitivity and subcritical specificity can yield optimal population coding
• Single-Neuron Criticality Optimizes Analog Dendritic Computation
• Tracking the distance to criticality in systems with unknown noise
• Emergence and Maintenance of Excitability: Kinetics over Structure