Collective Behavior of Neuronal Activities in Mouse Brains

Abstract: Characterizing the neural activities in human or mouse brains and understanding its functions is one of the most challenging problems in science. The complex networks formed by vast numbers of neurons and their interconnections made the problem almost intractable. However the recent breakthrough in imaging and recording electrical activity of large number of mouse neurons provide a renewed interest of the collective behavior of these neurons. It has been proposed and debated for a number of years that the biological neural networks quite often exhibit collective activities like avalanches with the so called self-organized criticality. The size and duration of these avalanches show power law distributions. Besides the evidences of the neurons showing dynamical critical behavior, the system has also been shown recently to be near a critical state in an equilibrium model.  In this talk this issue of criticality will be further examined by analyzing in-vivo data of hippocampus recorded by a miniscope mounted on several free-moving mice. We found it seems ubiquitous for the neural system to be in the proximity of a critical state. Details of the result and its implication will be discussed.