Supervisor: Sune Jespersen

Physical systems composed of many interacting components often exhibit criticality at a second-order phase transition. Near the critical point, such systems display scale-invariance and power-law correlations, maximal sensitivity to perturbations, and a rich repertoire of dynamical states.

The most informative parts of the external world occur at a borderline between trivial order and incomprehensible disorder. The critical brain hypothesis proposes viewing the brain as a system poised near a critical point between an ordered and a chaotic state. This may offer a unified framework for understanding how the brain achieves its extraordinary flexibility and computational power, optimizes its information transfer, and maximizes the time range over which it operates.

This talk will link ideas of self-organization, scale-invariance, and power-law dynamics to the emergence of neuronal avalanches as evidence for criticality in the brain.