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 …

Despite the development of large-scale data-acquisition techniques, experimental
observations of complex systems are often limited to a tiny fraction of the system under …

Much evidence seems to suggest the cortex operates near a critical point, yet a single set of
exponents defining its universality class has not been found. In fact, when critical exponents …

Neural tissues have been consistently observed to be spontaneously active and to generate
highly variable (scale-free distributed) outbursts of activity in vivo and in vitro. Understanding …

Many experimental results, both in vivo and in vitro, support the idea that the brain cortex
operates near a critical point and at the same time works as a reservoir of precise …

Neural activities in local circuits exhibit complex and multilevel dynamic features. Individual
neurons spike irregularly, which is believed to originate from receiving balanced amounts of …

Spreading processes on networks are ubiquitous in both human-made and natural systems.
Understanding their behavior is of broad interest: from the control of epidemics to …

Cortical neural circuits display highly irregular spiking in individual neurons but variably
sized collective firing, oscillations and critical avalanches at the population level, all of which …

Power laws in nature are considered to be signatures of complexity. The theory of self-
organized criticality (SOC) was proposed to explain their origins. A long-standing principle of …

The brain can be seen as a self-organized dynamical system that optimizes information
processing and storage capabilities. This is supported by studies across scales, from small …