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 …

Cognitive neuroscience has traditionally focused on simple tasks, presented sparsely and
using abstract stimuli. While this approach has yielded fundamental insights into functional …

Since the beginning of information processing by electronic components, the nervous
system has served as a metaphor for the organization of computational primitives. Brain …

A celebrated and controversial hypothesis suggests that some biological systems—parts,
aspects, or groups of them—may extract important functional benefits from operating at the …

Inverse problems in statistical physics are motivated by the challenges of 'big data'in
different fields, in particular high-throughput experiments in biology. In inverse problems, the …

Abstract Models of cognitive function typically focus on the cerebral cortex and hence
overlook functional links to subcortical structures. This view does not consider the role of the …

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 …

The critical state is assumed to be optimal for any computation in recurrent neural networks,
because criticality maximizes a number of abstract computational properties. We challenge …

Life depends as much on the flow of information as on the flow of energy. Here we review
the many efforts to make this intuition precise. Starting with the building blocks of information …

Although rigidity and jamming transitions have been widely studied in physics and material
science, their importance in a number of biological processes, including embryo …