The past 25 years have seen a strong increase in the number of publications related to
criticality in different areas of neuroscience. The potential of criticality to explain various …

The neural criticality hypothesis states that the brain may be poised in a critical state at a
boundary between different types of dynamics. Theoretical and experimental studies show …

Universality is a powerful concept, which enables making qualitative and quantitative
predictions in systems with extensively many degrees of freedom. It finds realizations in …

Power laws and distributions with heavy tails are common features of many complex
systems. Examples are the distribution of earthquake magnitudes, solar flare intensities and …

Understanding the origin, nature, and functional significance of complex patterns of neural
activity, as recorded by diverse electrophysiological and neuroimaging techniques, is a …

Introduced by the late Per Bak and his colleagues, self-organized criticality (SOC) has been
one of the most stimulating concepts to come out of statistical mechanics and condensed …

In self-organized critical (SOC) systems avalanche size distributions follow power-laws.
Power-laws have also been observed for neural activity, and so it has been proposed that …

This introductory article presents the special Discussion and Debate volume “From black
swans to dragon-kings, is there life beyond power laws?” We summarize and put in …

This essay is presented with two principal objectives in mind: first, to document the
prevalence of fractals at all levels of the nervous system, giving credence to the notion of …

Self-organized criticality is an elegant explanation of how complex structures emerge and
persist throughout nature, and why such structures often exhibit similar scale-invariant …