Criticality is the singular state of complex systems poised at the brink of a phase transition
between order and randomness. Such systems display remarkable information-processing …

The past 40 years have witnessed extensive research on fractal structure and scale-free
dynamics in the brain. Although considerable progress has been made, a comprehensive …

Highlights•The criticality hypothesis has received major attention in the past 25 years.•We
revise and discuss the experimental and conceptual controversies.•We propose that cortical …

The critical state is assumed to be optimal for any computation in recurrent neural networks,
because criticality maximizes a number of abstract computational properties. We challenge …

Despite the development of large-scale data-acquisition techniques, experimental
observations of complex systems are often limited to a tiny fraction of the system under …

Neurodegenerative diseases of the brain pose a major and increasing global health
challenge, with only limited progress made in develo** effective therapies over the last …

Self-organized criticality has been proposed to be a universal mechanism for the emergence
of scale-free dynamics in many complex systems, and possibly in the brain. While such …

The dynamics of complex systems generally include high-dimensional, nonstationary, and
nonlinear behavior, all of which pose fundamental challenges to quantitative understanding …

The human cortex is never at rest but in a state of sparse and noisy neural activity that can
be detected at broadly diverse resolution scales. It has been conjectured that such a state is …

It has been hypothesized that the brain optimizes its capacity for computation by self-
organizing to a critical point. The dynamical state of criticality is achieved by striking a …