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29 Jul 09

Disorderly genius: How chaos drives the brain

In reality, your brain operates on the edge of chaos. Though much of the time it runs in an orderly and stable way, every now and again it suddenly and unpredictably lurches into a blizzard of noise. | 29 June 2009 - New Scientist

www.newscientist.com/...ow-chaos-drives-the-brain.html - Preview

Neuroscience brain chaos neoruons cogsci

In reality, your brain operates on the edge of chaos. Though much of the time it runs in an orderly and stable way, every now and again it suddenly and unpredictably lurches into a blizzard of noise
"self-organised criticality"
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- even though individual sand avalanches are impossible to predict, their overall distribution is regular. The avalanches are "scale invariant", which means that avalanches of all possible sizes occur. They also follow a "power law" distribution, which means bigger avalanches happen less often than smaller avalanches, according to a strict mathematical ratio.
- when a single neuron fires, it can trigger its neighbours to fire too, causing a cascade or avalanche of activity that can propagate across small networks of brain cells.
- As it processes information, the brain often synchronises large groups of neurons to fire at the same frequency, a process called "phase-locking".
- But why should that be? Perhaps because self-organised criticality is the perfect starting point for many of the brain's functions.
- At the critical point, however, you get maximum transmission with minimum risk of descending into chaos.
- Thatcher says this is because a longer phase shift allows the brain to recruit many more neurons for the problem at hand. "It's like casting a net and capturing as many neurons as possible at any one time," he says. The result is a greater overall processing power that contributes to higher intelligence.