Criticality Maximizes Complexity in Neural Tissue.

The analysis of neural systems leverages tools from many different fields. Drawing on techniques from the study of critical phenomena in statistical mechanics, several studies have reported signatures of criticality in neural systems, including power-law distributions, shape collapses, and optimized quantities under tuning. Independently, neural complexity-an information theoretic measure-has been introduced in an effort to quantify the strength of correlations across multiple scales in a neural system.

Analysis of Power Laws, Shape Collapses, and Neural Complexity: New Techniques and MATLAB Support via the NCC Toolbox.

Neural systems include interactions that occur across many scales. Two divergent methods for characterizing such interactions have drawn on the physical analysis of critical phenomena and the mathematical study of information. Inferring criticality in neural systems has traditionally rested on fitting power laws to the property distributions of "neural avalanches" (contiguous bursts of activity), but the fractal nature of avalanche shapes has recently emerged as another signature of criticality.