Abstract
We revisit the CROS (“CRitical OScillations”) model which was recently proposed as an attempt to reproduce both scale-invariant neuronal avalanches and long-range temporal correlations. With excitatory and inhibitory stochastic neurons locally connected in a two-dimensional disordered network, the model exhibits a transition where alpha-band oscillations emerge. Precisely at the transition, the fluctuations of the network activity have nontrivial detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) exponents, and avalanches (defined as supra-threshold activity) have power law distributions of size and duration. We show that, differently from previous results, the exponents governing the distributions of avalanche size and duration are not necessarily those of the mean-field directed percolation universality class (3/2 and 2, respectively). Instead, in a narrow region of parameter space, avalanche exponents obtained via a maximum-likelihood estimator vary continuously and follow a linear relation, in good agreement with results obtained from M/EEG data. In that region, moreover, the values of avalanche and DFA exponents display a spread with positive correlations, reproducing human MEG results.
Highlights
The critical brain hypothesis [1] has emerged in the last decades as a potential framework for theoretically addressing many intriguing questions that have challenged neuroscientists
The term “neuronal avalanche” seemed like a natural choice, since the observed bursts of suprathreshold activity were interspersed by silence and showed a clear separation of time scales
It is important to keep in mind that, when dealing with empirical data, the avalanche definition inevitably requires the introduction of a threshold
Summary
The critical brain hypothesis [1] has emerged in the last decades as a potential framework for theoretically addressing many intriguing questions that have challenged neuroscientists. A seminal work by Beggs and Plenz in 2003 reported neuronal avalanches experimentally recorded in vitro [4], lending support to the criticality hypothesis and effectively laying the groundwork for a vast field of research that has involved neuroscientists and physicists alike [5]. In their original setup, spontaneous local field potentials (LFPs) were recorded from cultured slices of the rat brain [4]. Such scale-invariant statistics are one of the hallmarks of a critical system [6, 7]
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