Keith Hengen and Woodrow Shew explore criticality and cognition

In this “Brain Inspired” episode, Paul Middlebrooks talks with Keith Hengen, associate professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis and Woodrow Shew, professor of physics at the University of Arkansas. Building on a previous episode with John Beggs, they explain how cognitive functions in networks of neurons may directly depend on how close neural dynamics are to a special “critical” homeostatic set point. They also discuss new methods to measure criticality to reassess many previous findings that failed to find signatures of criticality in brains.

Read the transcript.