ArticleFrontiers in systems neuroscience2014
Spike avalanches in vivo suggest a driven, slightly subcritical brain state.
Article in Frontiers in systems neuroscience, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 129 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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129 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 589 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Hippocampal criticality tracks cognitive demand and shifts with memory impairment.Communications biology · 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
- Critical Dynamics in the Association Cortex Predict Higher Intelligence in Typically Developing Children.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Structured interconnectivity optimizes neural geometry for balancing specificity and generalization in object recognition.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Two views of the brain are reconciled by a unifying principle of maximal information processing.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- A hierarchy of time constants and reliable signal propagation in the marmoset cerebral cortex.Nature communications · 2025Article
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- A Shift Toward Supercritical Brain Dynamics Predicts Alzheimer's Disease Progression.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Mapping and modeling age-related changes in intrinsic neural timescales.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Static and Dynamic Cross-Network Functional Connectivity Shows Elevated Entropy in Schizophrenia Patients.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Multiscale intracranial EEG dynamics across sleep-wake states: toward memory-related processing.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2025Article
- A graph neural network approach to investigate brain critical states over neurodevelopment.Network neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Older is order: entropy reduction in cortical spontaneous activity marks healthy aging.BMC neuroscience · 2024Article
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- Multi-scale spiking network model of human cerebral cortex.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
69 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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9 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In self-organized critical (SOC) systems avalanche size distributions follow power-laws. Power-laws have also been observed for neural activity, and so it has been proposed that SOC underlies brain organization as well. Surprisingly, for spiking activity in vivo, evidence for SOC is still lacking. Therefore, we analyzed highly parallel spike recordings from awake rats and monkeys, anesthetized cats, and also local field potentials from humans. We compared these to spiking activity from two established critical models: the Bak-Tang-Wiesenfeld model, and a stochastic branching model. We found fundamental differences between the neural and the model activity. These differences could be overcome for both models through a combination of three modifications: (1) subsampling, (2) increasing the input to the model (this way eliminating the separation of time scales, which is fundamental to SOC and its avalanche definition), and (3) making the model slightly sub-critical. The match between the neural activity and the modified models held not only for the classical avalanche size distributions and estimated branching parameters, but also for two novel measures (mean avalanche size, and frequency of single spikes), and for the dependence of all these measures on the temporal bin size. Our results suggest that neural activity in vivo shows a mélange of avalanches, and not temporally separated ones, and that their global activity propagation can be approximated by the principle that one spike on average triggers a little less than one spike in the next step. This implies that neural activity does not reflect a SOC state but a slightly sub-critical regime without a separation of time scales. Potential advantages of this regime may be faster information processing, and a safety margin from super-criticality, which has been linked to epilepsy.
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