Signatures of structural criticality and universality in the cellular anatomy of the brain

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• Helen Ansell, Kovacs Lab: Complex Systems, Northwestern Uni, USA
• Thursday 15 June 2023, 13:15-14:30
• Theory Library.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr Hannah Price.

Recent cellular-level volumetric brain reconstructions have revealed an astronomical level of anatomic complexity. Determining which structural aspects of the brain to focus on, especially when comparing with computational models and other organisms, remains a major challenge. I will discuss our recent work using techniques from statistical physics to quantify aspects of this complexity in human, mouse and fruit fly brain samples. Our results show evidence that brain anatomy is poised close to the critical point of a phase transition, or structural criticality. We obtain estimates for critical exponents and show that they are consistent between organisms, indicating that certain brain structural properties may be described by a single brain universality class. Such universal quantities are robust to many of the microscopic details of individual brains, providing a key step towards generative computational brain models, and also clarifying in which sense one animal may be a suitable anatomic model for another

This talk is part of the Theoretical Physics Seminars series.

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• Bham Talks
• Theoretical Physics Seminars
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