ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2013
Neuronal avalanches in the resting MEG of the human brain.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 171 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
171 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Is criticality a unified setpoint of brain function?Neuron · 2025Pooled it
- Critical neuronal avalanches arise from excitation-inhibition balanced spontaneous activity.iScience · 2026Article
- Inhibitory Decay and Supercritical Brain Dynamics During Sleep Deprivation.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- Hierarchical whole-brain modeling of critical synchronization dynamics in the human brain.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- The role of high-amplitude bursts of high-gamma activity in naturalistic speech and music listening.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Symmetry breaking and avalanche shapes in modular neural networks.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2026Article
- Synergy mediates long-range correlations in the visual cortex near criticality.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2026Article
- Single-Neuron Critical Intermittency in a Stochastic Hodgkin-Huxley Model.The European journal of neuroscience · 2025Article
- Two views of the brain are reconciled by a unifying principle of maximal information processing.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Synergy mediates Long-Range Correlations in the Visual Cortex Near Criticality.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Impact of visual preferences for indoor green walls on emotion and brain activity of college students.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Adaptive proximity to criticality underlies amplification of ultra-slow fluctuations during free recall.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Abnormally enhanced temporal correlations of alpha oscillations across multiple timescales in tinnitus patients.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Inferring global exponents in subsampled neural systems.iScience · 2025Article
- Article
- 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
- Event-Marked Windowed Communication: Inferring Activity Propagation from Neural Time Series.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- The Administration of Ketamine Is Associated with Dose-Dependent Stabilization of Cortical Dynamics in Humans.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
111 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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9 authors.
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Abstract
What constitutes normal cortical dynamics in healthy human subjects is a major question in systems neuroscience. Numerous in vitro and in vivo animal studies have shown that ongoing or resting cortical dynamics are characterized by cascades of activity across many spatial scales, termed neuronal avalanches. In experiment and theory, avalanche dynamics are identified by two measures: (1) a power law in the size distribution of activity cascades with an exponent of -3/2 and (2) a branching parameter of the critical value of 1, reflecting balanced propagation of activity at the border of premature termination and potential blowup. Here we analyzed resting-state brain activity recorded using noninvasive magnetoencephalography (MEG) from 124 healthy human subjects and two different MEG facilities using different sensor technologies. We identified large deflections at single MEG sensors and combined them into spatiotemporal cascades on the sensor array using multiple timescales. Cascade size distributions obeyed power laws. For the timescale at which the branching parameter was close to 1, the power law exponent was -3/2. This relationship was robust to scaling and coarse graining of the sensor array. It was absent in phase-shuffled controls with the same power spectrum or empty scanner data. Our results demonstrate that normal cortical activity in healthy human subjects at rest organizes as neuronal avalanches and is well described by a critical branching process. Theory and experiment have shown that such critical, scale-free dynamics optimize information processing. Therefore, our findings imply that the human brain attains an optimal dynamical regime for information processing.
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