2025/12/19 by Jacob T. Crosser, Crosser, Jacob T., Braden A. W. Brinkman +1
Engineering · Neuroscience · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Memory and Neural Computing #Disordered Systems and Neural Networks (cond-mat.dis-nn) #FOS: Biological sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Neural dynamics and brain function #Neurons and Cognition (q-bio.NC) #stochastic dynamics and bifurcation
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2512.18113
openalex publication_date 2025/12/19 · openalex created_date 2025/12/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The critical brain hypothesis posits that neural circuitry operates near criticality to reap the computational benefits of accessing a wide range of timescales. The theory of critical phenomena generally predicts heavy-tailed (power-law) correlations in space and time near criticality, but it has been argued that in the brain such correlations could be inherited from ``latent variables,'' such as external sensory signals that are not directly observed when recording from neural circuitry. Distinguishing whether heavy-tailed correlations in neural activity are intrinsically generated within a neural circuit or are driven by unobserved latent variables is crucial for properly interpreting circuit functions. We argue that measuring neural responses to sudden perturbative inputs, rather than correlations in ongoing activity, can disambiguate these cases. We demonstrate this approach in a model of stochastic spiking neuron populations receiving external latent input that can be tuned to a critical state. We propose a scaling theory for the covariance and response functions of the spiking network, which we validate with simulations. We end by discussing how our approach might generalize to models of neural populations with more realistic biophysical details.