A celebrated and controversial hypothesis suggests that some biological systems—parts,
aspects, or groups of them—may extract important functional benefits from operating at the …

Criticality is hypothesized as a physical mechanism underlying efficient transitions between
cortical states and remarkable information-processing capacities in the brain. While …

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

The study of critical phenomena and universal power laws has been one of the central
advances in statistical mechanicsduring the second half of the past century, explaining …

Spontaneous fluctuations in neuronal activity emerge at many spatial and temporal scales in
cortex. Population measures found these fluctuations to organize as scale-invariant …

A multitude of systems ranging from the Barkhausen effect in ferromagnetic materials to
plastic deformation and earthquakes respond to slow external driving by exhibiting …

Behavioral contagion and the presence of behavioral cascades are natural features in
groups of animals showing collective motion, such as schooling fish or grazing herbivores …

In this book, the authors bring together basic ideas from fracture mechanics and statistical
physics, classical theories, simulation and experimental results to make the statistical …

We provide the first quantitative comparison between Barkhausen noise experiments and
recent predictions from the theory of avalanches for pinned interfaces, both in and beyond …

In this work, we present a systematic comparison of the results obtained from the low-
frequency Barkhausen noise recordings in nanocrystalline samples with those from the …