A Critical Assessment of the Brain Criticality Hypothesis

Abstract

A major unresolved question in Neuroscience is: What is the origin of the observed scale-invariant correlations in neural activity? Many researchers support the ``criticality hypothesis,'' which proposes that the brain operates near criticality, optimizing various information processing functions. However, the nature and behavior of criticality in cortical systems are still unclear. Alternatively, this opinion paper highlights that the coupling between neurons and slowly varying energetic resources, which may act as a form of ``memory,'' alone may be sufficient to generate a robust phase of neural activity with scale-invariant correlations. This memory-induced long-range order phase could provide a more natural explanation of the existing experimental data than the criticality hypothesis.