Event

To function optimally, living neuronal networks have been hypothesized to operate near a critical point, poised between a phase where activity is damped and a phase where activity is amplified. However, previous experimental evidence for critical dynamics has been controversial. Here we present new results to demonstrate that networks containing hundreds of cortical neurons are indeed operating near a critical point. This finding allows tools from statistical physics to be applied to the brain, and may point the way to a new description of healthy and diseased information processing.
Work by John Beggs in collaboration with Alan Litke and Karin Dahmen