The Brain: What is Critical About It?

We review the recent proposal that the most fascinating brain properties are related to the fact that it always stays close to a second order phase transition. In such conditions, the collective of neuronal groups can reliably generate robust and flexible behavior, because it is known that at the critical point there is the largest abundance of metastable states to choose from. Here we review the motivation, arguments and recent results, as well as further implications of this view of the functioning brain.

• Publication year

  2008

• Venue

  arXiv: Disordered Systems and Neural Networks

• Publication date

  2008-03-31

• Fields of study

  Biology, Mathematics, Physics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1063/1.2965095arXiv 0804.0032
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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