Criticality in the brain: A synthesis of neurobiology, models and cognition.

By Luca Cocchi, Leonardo L. Gollo, Andrew Zalesky, Michael Breakspear. Progress in neurobiology, 2017

520 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cognitive function requires the coordination of neural activity across many scales, from neurons and circuits to large-scale networks. As such, it is unlikely that an explanatory framework focused upon any single scale will yield a comprehensive theory of brain activity and cognitive function. Modelling and analysis methods for neuroscience should aim to accommodate multiscale phenomena. Emerging research now suggests that multi-scale processes in the brain arise from so-called critical phenomena that occur very broadly in the natural world. Criticality arises in complex systems perched between order and disorder, and is marked by fluctuations that do not have any privileged spatial or temporal scale. We review the core nature of criticality, the evidence supporting its role in neural systems and its explanatory potential in brain health and disease.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9e090d1a64168d18a8563cf7440294ada47bffe3

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Colloquium: Criticality and dynamical scaling in living systems (2017, background): “…by Mora and Bialek (2011) which popularized the subject, and other focused on neural dynamics (Beggs, 2008; Chialvo, 2010; Chialvo et al., 2008; Cocchi et al., 2017; Hesse and Gross, 2014; Massobrio et al., 2015; Plenz and Niebur, 2014; Shew and Plenz, 2013), gene networks (Roli et al., 2015),…”
Questions and controversies in the study of time-varying functional connectivity in resting fMRI (2020, unknown): “Rather, such ﬂuctuations could be consistent with a more restricted space of stationary stochastic models that may still have scientiﬁcally interesting properties (i.e., have heavy spatial and temporal tails; Cocchi et al., 2017; R. L. Miller et al., 2018; Roberts et al., 2015).”
REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics (2019, background): “, 2018c) and critical slowing (Cocchi et al., 2017); see Fig.”
Neuronal Avalanches in Naturalistic Speech and Music Listening (2023, background): “Besides computational efﬁciency, binarization allows the deployment of a series of conceptual tools such as information theory (46), the study of network dynamics (18), as well as paradigms such as brain criticality (53 ,54) .”