Critical Brain Hypothesis
Table of Contents
- At critical point, the stuctures are self-similar
The ability of the phenomenon of criticality to explain the sudden emergence of new properties in complex systems has fascinated scientists in recent decades. When systems are balanced at their “critical point,” small changes in individual units can trigger outsized events, just as falling pebbles can start an avalanche. That abrupt shift in behavior describes the phase changes of water from ice to liquid to gas, but it’s also relevant to many other situations, from flocks of starlings on the wing to stock market crashes. In the 1990s, the physicist Per Bak and other scientists suggested that the brain might be operating near its own critical point. Ever since then, neuroscientists have been searching for evidence of fractal patterns and power laws at work in the brain’s networks of neurons. What was once a fringe theory has begun to attract more mainstream attention, with researchers now hunting for mechanisms capable of tuning brains toward criticality.
1. Relevant Articles
1.1. Your Brain Is On the Brink of Chaos - Nautilus
Article Link: https://nautil.us/your-brain-is-on-the-brink-of-chaos-234981/
Excerpts:
- Among many scientists, too, there is a great deal of resistance to the idea that chaos is at work in biological systems. Many intentionally preclude it from their models. It subverts computationalism, which is the idea that the brain is nothing more than a complicated, but fundamentally rule-based, computer.
- Chaos seems unqualified as a mechanism of biological information processing, as it allows noise to propagate without bounds, corrupting information transmission and storage.
- Chaos is not the same as disorder.
- because it’s unpredictable, it’s a strong candidate for the dynamical substrate of free will.
1.2. Your Brain Operates at the Edge of Chaos. Why That's Actually a Good Thing - CNET
Article Link: https://www.cnet.com/science/biology/features/your-brain-operates-at-the-edge-of-chaos-why-thats-actually-a-good-thing/
Excerpts:
- By studying the minds of monkeys, turtles, fish and, of course, humans, scientists have delved into this perilous place. It's known as the "edge of chaos" or less dramatically, the "critical point".
- critical point offers brains a "desirable trade-off between linearity, optimal for information storage, and nonlinearity, required for computation."
- Edge-of-chaos systems have a super-duper-ultra-wide range within which to work, thanks to the whole fluctuation thing. "you could have information passed from one part of the brain to the next … and perhaps even go through the entire brain"
- If you walk away with only one message, I hope it's this one: The next time you're stressed out, if someone asks how you're doing and you say, "I'm on the edge of chaos," you're not being dramatic at all. You're being scientifically accurate.