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Neuronal Avalanches

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Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience

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Synonyms

Balanced propagation; Critical branching process; Neuronal cascades; Power-law distributed patterns; Scale-invariant patterns

Definition

Spatiotemporal patterns comprised of local neuronal activity events that follow scale-invariant statistics. Pattern statistics is quantified by a power law distribution in pattern size, s, and pattern duration, t. The balanced propagation of activity during avalanche unfolding takes on the form of a branching process. Specifically, the probability distribution P(s) takes the functional form of a power law P(s) ~ s−α, with exponent α = 3/2, and P(t) ~ s−β with β = 2. The branching parameter, σ, estimated by the ratio of future to current events during an avalanche is critical, i.e., σ = 1. On average, neuronal activity neither grows nor decreases during avalanching.

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History of Neuronal Avalanches

Experimentally, neuronal avalanches were first identified in 2003 in the spontaneous activity of cortex slice cultures and...

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Intramural Research Program of the NIMH ZIAMH002797 (Plenz) and by National Science Foundation CRCNS grant #1308174 (Shew) and by Arkansas Biosciences Institute grants 0055 and 0070 (Shew). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Section on Critical Brain Dynamics, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, MD, USA

    Dietmar Plenz

  2. Department of Physics, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, USA

    Woodrow Shew

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  1. Dietmar Plenz
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  2. Woodrow Shew
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Correspondence to Dietmar Plenz .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Atlanta, GA, USA

    Dieter Jaeger

  2. Department of Biomedical Engineering, Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA

    Ranu Jung

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  1. W.M. Keck Science Center, The Claremont Colleges, Claremont, CA, USA

    John Milton Professor of Biology

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Plenz, D., Shew, W. (2018). Neuronal Avalanches. In: Jaeger, D., Jung, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_743-4

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Chapter history

  1. Latest

    Neuronal Avalanches
    Published:
    03 September 2018

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_743-4

  2. Original

    Neuronal Avalanches
    Published:
    08 February 2014

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_743-3

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