ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Thermodynamics and signatures of criticality in a network of neurons.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 91 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
91 citing papers in PubMed, 265 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Article
- What is emergence, after all?PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- State-space kinetic Ising model reveals task-dependent entropy flow in sparsely active nonequilibrium neuronal dynamics.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Minimax entropy: The statistical physics of optimal models.Physical review. E · 2025Article
- Article
- Statistical physics of large-scale neural activity with loops.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Explosive neural networks via higher-order interactions in curved statistical manifolds.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Article
- The cortical critical power law balances energy and information in an optimal fashion.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 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
- Phase transitions inArXiv · 2025Article
- Exact minimax entropy models of large-scale neuronal activity.Physical review. E · 2025Article
- Brain-Wide Impacts of Sedation on Spontaneous Activity and Auditory Processing in Larval Zebrafish.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Energy landscape analysis based on the Ising model: Tutorial review.PLOS complex systems · 2025Article
- Homeostatic synaptic normalization optimizes learning in network models of neural population codes.eLife · 2024Article
- Spontaneous Brain Activity Emerges from Pairwise Interactions in the Larval Zebrafish Brain.Physical review. X · 2024Article
- Information Thermodynamics: From Physics to Neuroscience.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Thermodynamic analog of integrate-and-fire neuronal networks by maximum entropy modelling.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Ising-like model replicating time-averaged spiking behaviour of in vitro neuronal networks.Scientific reports · 2024Article
31 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
The activity of a neural network is defined by patterns of spiking and silence from the individual neurons. Because spikes are (relatively) sparse, patterns of activity with increasing numbers of spikes are less probable, but, with more spikes, the number of possible patterns increases. This tradeoff between probability and numerosity is mathematically equivalent to the relationship between entropy and energy in statistical physics. We construct this relationship for populations of up to N = 160 neurons in a small patch of the vertebrate retina, using a combination of direct and model-based analyses of experiments on the response of this network to naturalistic movies. We see signs of a thermodynamic limit, where the entropy per neuron approaches a smooth function of the energy per neuron as N increases. The form of this function corresponds to the distribution of activity being poised near an unusual kind of critical point. We suggest further tests of criticality, and give a brief discussion of its functional significance.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.