Why Brain Criticality Is Clinically Relevant: A Scoping Review

Abstract

The past 25 years have seen a strong increase in the number of publications related to criticality in different areas of neuroscience. The potential of criticality to explain various brain properties, including optimal information processing, has made it an increasingly exciting area of investigation for neuroscientists. Recent reviews on this topic, sometimes termed brain criticality, make brief mention of clinical applications of these findings to several neurological disorders such as epilepsy, neurodegenerative disease, and neonatal hypoxia. Other clinicallyrelevant domains-including anesthesia, sleep medicine, developmental-behavioral pediatrics, and psychiatry-are seldom discussed in review papers of brain criticality. Thorough assessments of these application areas and their relevance for clinicians have also yet to be published. In this scoping review, studies of brain criticality involving human data of all ages are evaluated for their current and future clinical relevance. To make the results of these studies understandable to a more clinical audience, a review of the key concepts behind criticality (e.g., phase transitions, long-range temporal correlation, self-organized criticality, power laws, branching processes) precedes the discussion of human clinical studies. Open questions and forthcoming areas of investigation are also considered.

Criticality, Connectivity, and Neural Disorder: A Multifaceted Approach to Neural Computation

“…The existing literature detailing disorders as disrupted criticality largely pertain to the macroscale (see Zimmern, 2020 for a comprehensive review), as examined through (i)EEG (Thatcher et al, 2009 ), ECoG (Chaudhuri et al, 2018 ), and fMRI (Tagliazucchi et al, 2012 ). Even with the growing number of researchers examining the dynamics of mesoscale networks, there is still a lack of research turning these in vitro and in vivo methods toward the dynamics of perturbed networks.…”

Dynamics of Long-Range Temporal Correlations in Broadband EEG During Different Motor Execution and Imagery Tasks

“…The LRTCs have been observed in the alpha, beta, theta oscillation amplitude envelopes (Berthouze et al, 2010), alpha oscillation phase (Botcharova et al, 2014), broadband phase synchrony (Kitzbichler et al, 2009), avalanches (Benayoun et al, 2010;Palva et al, 2013), and energy profile (Parish et al, 2004;Benayoun et al, 2010). It is commonly postulated in the literature that the power-law behavior and LRTCs occur because the brain operates at criticality (Poil et al, 2012;Massobrio et al, 2015), thus optimizing information storage capacity (Kitzbichler et al, 2009) and enabling quick adaptation to the cognitive processing demands (Ezaki et al, 2020;Ouyang et al, 2020;Zimmern, 2020). In the absence of long-range temporal correlations, correlations on shorter timescales lead to reduction in the ability to integrate information (for example, during certain stages of sleep; Meisel et al, 2017).…”

Virtual Reality as a Technological-Aided Solution to Support Communication in Persons With Neurodegenerative Diseases and Acquired Brain Injury During COVID-19 Pandemic

“…To be effective, a rehabilitative intervention should be implemented early regarding brain damage and should be intensive and assiduously prolonged over the time. Moreover, to be consolidated and generalized, the learning process should be pursued across settings ( 9 , 10 ). Unfortunately, COVID-19 pandemic relevantly impeded the implementation and the realization of those conditions ( 11 , 12 ).…”