Being Critical of Criticality in the Brain

By John M. Beggs, Nicholas M. Timme. Front. Physio., 2012

512 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Relatively recent work has reported that networks of neurons can produce avalanches of activity whose sizes follow a power law distribution. This suggests that these networks may be operating near a critical point, poised between a phase where activity rapidly dies out and a phase where activity is amplified over time. The hypothesis that the electrical activity of neural networks in the brain is critical is potentially important, as many simulations suggest that information processing functions would be optimized at the critical point. This hypothesis, however, is still controversial. Here we will explain the concept of criticality and review the substantial objections to the criticality hypothesis raised by skeptics. Points and counter points are presented in dialog form.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Economics and Econometrics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2bb7361145088ae623f3ddf9c2aae701d0bf1293

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Citations in the corpus

Consciousness as a phenomenon in the operational architectonics of brain organization: Criticality and self-organization considerations (2013, background): “existence of greatly correlated states which at the same time are able to wildly fluctuate at all scales [227,233,238].”
Criticality in the brain: A synthesis of neurobiology, models and cognition. (2017, background): “…and Jirsa, 2012; Kelso et al., 1992; Priesemann et al., 2014; Scott et al., 2014) on the background of an existing body of reviews and syntheses (Beggs and Timme, 2012; Chialvo, 2010; Deco and Jirsa, 2012; Boonstra et al., 2013; Hesse and Gross, 2014; Kelso et al., 1992; Plenz and Thiagarajan,…”
Functional connectivity dynamically evolves on multiple time-scales over a static structural connectome: Models and mechanisms (2017, background): “…complex network topologies (typically, but not necessarily, scale-free) have been shown to enhance self-organized criticality (Rubinov et al., 2011, Beggs and Timme, 2012) so the neuroanatomical connectivity structure certainly plays a role in shaping the macro-scale critical behavior of the…”
Spike avalanches in vivo suggest a driven, slightly subcritical brain state (2014, background): “…variables, and abbreviations: α, connection strength or synaptic strength; β, scaling exponent (DFA); σ , branching parameter; σ ∗, estimated branching parameter; τ , critical exponent of the avalanche size distribution; bs, bin size; DFA, detrended fluctuation analysis; f(s), avalanche size…”
Inverse statistical problems: from the inverse Ising problem to data science (2017, background): “Empirical evidence for critical behaviour has been reported in systems as diverse as neural networks [21, 22] and financial markets [41, 80], leading to the intriguing hypothesis that some information-processing systems may be operating at a critical point [151].”
Self-organized criticality as a fundamental property of neural systems (2014, background): “Neural criticality has been reviewed in recent articles (Beggs, 2008; Kello et al., 2010; Beggs and Timme, 2012; Shew and Plenz, 2013; Marković and Gros, 2014) and is the topic of a contributed volume (Plenz and Niebur, 2014).”
Neuronal Avalanches in Naturalistic Speech and Music Listening (2023, background): “While the brain criticality hypothesis remains debated (19), evidence shows (20) that neuronal avalanches are a valid marker of physiological brain states beyond the criticality assumption.”