A critical initialization for biological neural networks

Main Intrinsically generated neuronal activity contains macroscopic modes of coordination between neurons that extend across the entire mouse brain 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 . More activity variance is concentrated into the top dimensions of neural activity than would be expected for independently firing neurons. At the same time, there is no low-dimensional cutoff of variance concentration, and variance scales as a power-law of the eigenmode number 2 . As yet, there are no mechanistic models that can explain this scaling of variance, but macroscopic variability in general has been hypothesized to arise from neural network dynamics operating in either a critical or chaotic regime 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 .

A critical initialization for biological neural networks. Main Intrinsically generated neuronal activity contains macroscopic modes of coordination between neurons that extend across the entire mouse brain 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 . More activity variance is concentrated into the top dimensions of neural activity than would be expected for independently firing neurons. At the same time, there is no low-dimensional cutoff of variance concentration, and variance scales as a power-law of the eigenmode number 2 . As yet, there are no mechanistic models that can explain this scaling of variance, but macroscopic variability in general has been hypothesized to arise from neural network dynamics operating in either a critical or chaotic regime 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 . Emergent macroscopic structure has also been studied in artificial neural networks, usual...