ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
Landau-Ginzburg theory of cortex dynamics: Scale-free avalanches emerge at the edge of synchronization.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 63 papers.
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63 citing papers in PubMed.
- Clinical markers of disease progression in the prodromal to overt alpha-synucleinopathy continuum.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2026Article
- Critical neuronal avalanches arise from excitation-inhibition balanced spontaneous activity.iScience · 2026Article
- Selective perturbation of mirror and non-mirror neurons in an in silico model of the action observation network.iScience · 2026Article
- Whisker stimulation reinforces a resting-state network in the barrel cortex: Nested oscillations and avalanches.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Linearizing and Forecasting: A Reservoir Computing Route to Digital Twins of the Brain.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- The role of high-amplitude bursts of high-gamma activity in naturalistic speech and music listening.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Network Desynchronization with Sine Waves: from Synchrony to Asynchrony by Periodic Stimulation.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 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
- Self-organized and self-sustained ensemble activity patterns in simulation of mouse primary motor cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Signatures of criticality in efficient coding networks.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Slow ramping emerges from spontaneous fluctuations in spiking neural networks.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Collective dynamics and long-range order in thermal neuristor networks.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Synchronization in fractional-order neural networks by the energy balance strategy.Cognitive neurodynamics · 2024Article
- Cocaine diminishes functional network robustness and destabilizes the energy landscape of neuronal activity in the medial prefrontal cortex.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Simulated dynamical transitions in a heterogeneous marmoset pFC cluster.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2024Article
- Criticality and partial synchronization analysis in Wilson-Cowan and Jansen-Rit neural mass models.PloS one · 2024Article
- Laying the foundations for a theory of consciousness: the significance of critical brain dynamics for the formation of conscious states.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2024Article
- Landau model for illustrating the learning and unlearning process of nociplastic pain.Frontiers in pain research (Lausanne, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Criticality and universality in neuronal cultures during "up" and "down" states.Frontiers in neural circuits · 2024Article
- Critical-like Brain Dynamics in a Continuum from Second- to First-Order Phase Transition.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
3 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Abstract
Understanding the origin, nature, and functional significance of complex patterns of neural activity, as recorded by diverse electrophysiological and neuroimaging techniques, is a central challenge in neuroscience. Such patterns include collective oscillations emerging out of neural synchronization as well as highly heterogeneous outbursts of activity interspersed by periods of quiescence, called "neuronal avalanches." Much debate has been generated about the possible scale invariance or criticality of such avalanches and its relevance for brain function. Aimed at shedding light onto this, here we analyze the large-scale collective properties of the cortex by using a mesoscopic approach following the principle of parsimony of Landau-Ginzburg. Our model is similar to that of Wilson-Cowan for neural dynamics but crucially, includes stochasticity and space; synaptic plasticity and inhibition are considered as possible regulatory mechanisms. Detailed analyses uncover a phase diagram including down-state, synchronous, asynchronous, and up-state phases and reveal that empirical findings for neuronal avalanches are consistently reproduced by tuning our model to the edge of synchronization. This reveals that the putative criticality of cortical dynamics does not correspond to a quiescent-to-active phase transition as usually assumed in theoretical approaches but to a synchronization phase transition, at which incipient oscillations and scale-free avalanches coexist. Furthermore, our model also accounts for up and down states as they occur (e.g., during deep sleep). This approach constitutes a framework to rationalize the possible collective phases and phase transitions of cortical networks in simple terms, thus helping to shed light on basic aspects of brain functioning from a very broad perspective.
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