The brain has characteristics of criticality
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Several signatures have been found in the human brain:
- Scale-invariant power law distributions in neural avalanches observed in vitro Beggs2003
- Clusters of activation during resting-state fMRI Tagliazucchi2012
- Duration of interregional phase-locking (fMRI, MEG) Kitzbichler2009 Botcharova2014
- Fractal structure in brain structure & function Expert2011
- Small-world organization consistent with presence of long-range correlations Bassett2017
The brain during wakefulness exhibits dynamics consistent with criticality Toker2022
Evidence suggests the brain resides toward the sub-critical end of a ‘zone of criticality’ (Priesemann2014)
Brain criticality may be better thought of as a ‘zone’ rather than a ‘point’ (Moretti2013)
Brain dynamics shift towards sub-criticality with increasing cognitive load (Fagerholm2015).
Psychedelics are the only known example where both entropy and criticality are increased (Atasoy2017).
- There is evidence to suggest that seizure is super-critical (Meisel2012)
- Increase in goodness of fit of harmonic brain-state dynamics to power laws after LSD Atasoy2017