Disentangling the critical signatures of neural activity

Benedetta Mariani, Giorgio Nicoletti, Marta Bisio, Marta Maschietto, Stefano Vassanelli, Samir Suweis

Published in Sci. Rep. 12, 10770 (2022), 2022

Recommended citation: Benedetta Mariani, Giorgio Nicoletti, Marta Bisio, Marta Maschietto, Stefano Vassanelli, Samir Suweis. Disentangling the critical signatures of neural activity. Sci. Rep. 12, 10770 (2022).

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Abstract

The critical brain hypothesis has emerged as an attractive framework to understand neuronal activity, but it is still widely debated. In this work, we analyze data from a multi-electrodes array in the rat’s cortex and we find that power-law neuronal avalanches satisfying the crackling-noise relation coexist with spatial correlations that display typical features of critical systems. In order to shed a light on the underlying mechanisms at the origin of these signatures of criticality, we introduce a paradigmatic framework with a common stochastic modulation and pairwise linear interactions inferred from our data. We show that in such models power-law avalanches that satisfy the crackling-noise relation emerge as a consequence of the extrinsic modulation, whereas scale-free correlations are solely determined by internal interactions. Moreover, this disentangling is fully captured by the mutual information in the system. Finally, we show that analogous power-law avalanches are found in more realistic models of neural activity as well, suggesting that extrinsic modulation might be a broad mechanism for their generation.