#32 · Systems biology

Criticality emerges with neuron count; motifs and interneurons reshape dynamics

The common thread is how network scale and connectivity structure set the dynamical regime of neural activity. One item infers maximum-entropy models from large mouse brain recordings and reports drift toward criticality as neuron count grows, without fine-tuning. The other two items are mechanistic: a neural field model with PV and SST interneurons derives bump stability and the wandering diffusion coefficient governing working memory, and a mean-field analysis of random rate networks shows that second-order synaptic motifs reshape chaos, multistability and attractor dimension. What is new is the explicit linkage of criticality to scale in data-driven models, alongside analytical accounts of how cell-type composition and motif structure tune attractor dynamics.