TY  - JOUR
A1  - Priesemann, Viola
A1  - Wibral, Michael
A1  - Valderrama, Mario
A1  - Pröpper, Robert
A1  - Le Van Quyen, Michel
A1  - Geisel, Theo
A1  - Triesch, Jochen
A1  - Nikolić, Danko
A1  - Munk, Matthias Hans Joachim
T1  - Spike avalanches in vivo suggest a driven, slightly subcritical brain state
T2  - Frontiers in systems neuroscience
N2  - In self-organized critical (SOC) systems avalanche size distributions follow power-laws. Power-laws have also been observed for neural activity, and so it has been proposed that SOC underlies brain organization as well. Surprisingly, for spiking activity in vivo, evidence for SOC is still lacking. Therefore, we analyzed highly parallel spike recordings from awake rats and monkeys, anesthetized cats, and also local field potentials from humans. We compared these to spiking activity from two established critical models: the Bak-Tang-Wiesenfeld model, and a stochastic branching model. We found fundamental differences between the neural and the model activity. These differences could be overcome for both models through a combination of three modifications: (1) subsampling, (2) increasing the input to the model (this way eliminating the separation of time scales, which is fundamental to SOC and its avalanche definition), and (3) making the model slightly sub-critical. The match between the neural activity and the modified models held not only for the classical avalanche size distributions and estimated branching parameters, but also for two novel measures (mean avalanche size, and frequency of single spikes), and for the dependence of all these measures on the temporal bin size. Our results suggest that neural activity in vivo shows a mélange of avalanches, and not temporally separated ones, and that their global activity propagation can be approximated by the principle that one spike on average triggers a little less than one spike in the next step. This implies that neural activity does not reflect a SOC state but a slightly sub-critical regime without a separation of time scales. Potential advantages of this regime may be faster information processing, and a safety margin from super-criticality, which has been linked to epilepsy.
KW  - self-organized criticality
KW  - human intracranial recordings
KW  - spike train analysis
KW  - highly parallel recordings
KW  - spiking neural networks
KW  - multiunit activity
KW  - cortex
KW  - monkeys
Y1  - 2014
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/51525
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-515253
SN  - 1662-5137
N1  - Copyright: © 2014 Priesemann, Wibral, Valderrama, Pröpper, Le Van Quyen, Geisel, Triesch, Nikolić and Munk. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
VL  - 8
IS  - Art. 108
SP  - 1
EP  - 17
PB  - Frontiers Research Foundation
CY  - Lausanne
ER  -