Criticality of neuronal avalanches in human sleep and their relationship with sleep macro- and micro-architecture

Abstract

We explore neural avalanches, and the scaling relation among critical exponents, in overnight EEG recordings in human healthy subjects, during NREM sleep. Notably, the distributions of the avalanches’ size and duration are well described by a power law, with critical exponents in agreement with mean-field directed percolation class. Moreover, we study the correlation between the avalanches’ spatiotemporal structure and the sleep macro and microstructure as reflected by the CAP framework. Overall, our findings provide evidence of a link between the avalanche’s occurrence, slow-wave sleep dynamics, sleep stages transitions and CAP-phase A.

Beyond pulsed inhibition: Alpha oscillations modulate attenuation and amplification of neural activity in the awake resting-state

“…This further confirms that the AAD and the Omori law are related to the alpha rhythm dominating the awake resting-state, and suggests distinct generative mechanisms for the cascading process during NREM sleep. Despite the here-reported difference in avalanche dynamics between sleep and awake restingstate, neuronal avalanches during sleep show power-law size and duration distributions consistent with criticality [67, 68], as observed in the awake resting-state [36, 37].…”

L-Dopa-induced changes in aperiodic bursts dynamics relate to individual clinical improvement in Parkinson’s disease

“…Neuronal avalanches are characterized by their size, s, defined as the number of channels recruited during the avalanche; their duration, and the inter-avalanche interval (IAI), defined as the time interval between two consecutive avalanches (Figure 1.A). (Scarpetta et al, 2023)). The avalanche duration is defined as the total length of an avalanche, while the avalanche size corresponds to the number of recording sites recruited during the avalanche.…”

“…Aperiodic, spontaneous bursts spreading across a range of spatial and temporal scales ("neuronal avalanches") have been consistently observed across different imaging modalities and spatio-temporal scales (Tagliazucchi et al, 2012;Palva et al, 2013;Priesemann et al, 2013). Neuronal avalanches, manifesting as bursts of activations spreading across multiple brain signals, characterize the large-scale interactions across multiple brain regions, and constitute a marker of physiological states, for example allowing the characterization of conditions such as sleep and resting wakefulness (Priesemann et al, 2013;Scarpetta et al, 2023), or speech and music listening (Neri et al, 2023). Furthermore, avalanche dynamics were shown to be altered in PD patients, and proportionally to clinical impairment (Sorrentino et al, 2021a).…”

Criticality explains structure-function relationships in the human brain

“…The aim to detect intervals of large deviations activity is similar to the original works on neuronal avalanches derived from Local Field Potential (LFP) ( [38,62]) and from Multiunit Activity (MUA) spike counts [63]. While for MUA, avalanches were defined as periods of time when the MUA spike count exceeded a positive threshold, and for LFP the excursions were defined for negative potentials due to their close correlation to neuronal spiking, herein, for MEG signals, we considered both positive and negative potentials to identify avalanches in line with previous works on EEG/MEG data ( [7,[64][65][66] A Gaussian distribution of amplitudes is expected to arise from a superposition of many uncorrelated sources. Conversely, MEG amplitude distributions deviate from a Gaussian shape, indicating the presence of spatiotemporal correlations and collective behaviors (Fig.…”