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 …

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 …

Previous studies suggest that the brain operates at a critical point in which phases of order
and disorder coexist, producing emergent patterned dynamics at all scales and optimizing …

Self-organized criticality has been proposed to be a universal mechanism for the emergence
of scale-free dynamics in many complex systems, and possibly in the brain. While such …

Pupil diameter is often treated as a noninvasive readout of activity in the locus coeruleus
(LC). However, how accurately it can be used to index LC activity is not known. To address …

The brain requires diverse segregated and integrated processing to perform normal
functions in terms of anatomical structure and self-organized dynamics with critical features …

Recent experimental results on spike avalanches measured in the urethane-anesthetized
rat cortex have revealed scaling relations that indicate a phase transition at a specific level …

The brain is in a state of perpetual reverberant neural activity, even in the absence of
specific tasks or stimuli. Shedding light on the origin and functional significance of such a …

The brain displays a remarkable ability to sustain stable memories, allowing animals to
execute precise behaviors or recall stimulus associations years after they were first learned …

According to many experimental observations, neurons in cerebral cortex tend to operate in
an asynchronous regime, firing independently of each other. In contrast, many other …