ArticlePLoS computational biology2013
Neuronal avalanches differ from wakefulness to deep sleep--evidence from intracranial depth recordings in humans.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 96 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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96 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 231 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Is criticality a unified setpoint of brain function?Neuron · 2025Pooled it
- Sleep Deprivation in Mice: Looking Beyond the Slow Wave Rebound.Journal of sleep research · 2026Article
- Hippocampal criticality tracks cognitive demand and shifts with memory impairment.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Symmetry breaking and avalanche shapes in modular neural networks.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2026Article
- The role of high-amplitude bursts of high-gamma activity in naturalistic speech and music listening.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Multifractal Cascade Modeling Reveals Fundamental Limits of Current Neuroimaging Strategies.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Unveiling Cortical Criticality Changes along the Prodromal to the Overt Continuum of Alpha-Synucleinopathy.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Genetic contributions to brain criticality and its relationship with human cognitive functions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- L-Dopa-induced changes in aperiodic bursts dynamics relate to individual clinical improvement in Parkinson's disease.NPJ Parkinson's disease · 2025Article
- The futuristic manifolds of REM sleep.Journal of sleep research · 2025Review
- Multiscale intracranial EEG dynamics across sleep-wake states: toward memory-related processing.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2025Article
- Role of homeostatic plasticity in critical brain dynamics following focal stroke lesions.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Role of the Locus Coeruleus Arousal Promoting Neurons in Maintaining Brain Criticality across the Sleep-Wake Cycle.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Existence of multiple transitions of the critical state due to anesthetics.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Thermodynamic analog of integrate-and-fire neuronal networks by maximum entropy modelling.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Brain flexibility increases during the peri-ovulatory phase as compared to early follicular phase of the menstrual cycle.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- A predictive propensity measure to enter REM sleep.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2024Article
- Criticality and universality in neuronal cultures during "up" and "down" states.Frontiers in neural circuits · 2024Article
- Beyond pulsed inhibition: Alpha oscillations modulate attenuation and amplification of neural activity in the awake resting state.Cell reports · 2023Article
36 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Neuronal activity differs between wakefulness and sleep states. In contrast, an attractor state, called self-organized critical (SOC), was proposed to govern brain dynamics because it allows for optimal information coding. But is the human brain SOC for each vigilance state despite the variations in neuronal dynamics? We characterized neuronal avalanches--spatiotemporal waves of enhanced activity--from dense intracranial depth recordings in humans. We showed that avalanche distributions closely follow a power law--the hallmark feature of SOC--for each vigilance state. However, avalanches clearly differ with vigilance states: slow wave sleep (SWS) shows large avalanches, wakefulness intermediate, and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep small ones. Our SOC model, together with the data, suggested first that the differences are mediated by global but tiny changes in synaptic strength, and second, that the changes with vigilance states reflect small deviations from criticality to the subcritical regime, implying that the human brain does not operate at criticality proper but close to SOC. Independent of criticality, the analysis confirms that SWS shows increased correlations between cortical areas, and reveals that REM sleep shows more fragmented cortical dynamics.
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