Criticality is the singular state of complex systems poised at the brink of a phase transition
between order and randomness. Such systems display remarkable information-processing …

The past twenty-five years have seen a strong increase in the number of publications related
to criticality in different areas of neuroscience. The potential of criticality to explain various …

Self-organized criticality (SOC) refers to the ability of complex systems to evolve toward a
second-order phase transition at which interactions between system components lead to …

The past 40 years have witnessed extensive research on fractal structure and scale-free
dynamics in the brain. Although considerable progress has been made, a comprehensive …

Highlights•The criticality hypothesis has received major attention in the past 25 years.•We
revise and discuss the experimental and conceptual controversies.•We propose that cortical …

Current efforts to achieve neuromorphic computation are focused on highly organized
architectures, such as integrated circuits and regular arrays of memristors, which lack the …

Sleep is assumed to subserve homeostatic processes in the brain; however, the set point
around which sleep tunes circuit computations is unknown. Slow-wave activity (SWA) is …

How the cerebral cortex operates near a critical phase transition point for optimum
performance. Individual neurons have limited computational powers, but when they work …

The hypothesis that living neural networks operate near a critical phase transition point has
received substantial discussion. This “criticality hypothesis” is potentially important because …

Environmental events are processed on multiple timescales via hierarchical organization of
temporal receptive windows (TRWs) in the brain. The dependence of neural timescales and …