Ising-like dynamics in large-scale brain functional networks

DANIEL FRAIMAN; PABLO BALENZUELA; JENNIFER FOSS; DANTE CHIALVO

PHYSICAL REVIEW E - STATISTICAL PHYSICS, PLASMAS, FLUIDS AND RELATED INTERDISCIPLINARY TOPICS

APS, American Physical Society

Año: 2009 vol. 79 p. 61922 - 61931

1063-651X

Brain “rest” is defined—more or less unsuccessfully—as the state in which there is no explicit brain input or output. This work focuses on the question of whether such state can be comparable to any known dynamical state. For that purpose, correlation networks from human brain functional magnetic resonance imaging are contrasted with correlation networks extracted from numerical simulations of the Ising model in two dimensions at different temperatures. For the critical temperature T, striking similarities appear in the most relevant statistical properties, making the two networks indistinguishable from each other. These results are interpreted here as lending support to the conjecture that the dynamics of the functioning brain is near a critical point.