Authors
James A Roberts, Tjeerd W Boonstra, Michael Breakspear
Publication date
2015/4/1
Source
Current opinion in neurobiology
Volume
31
Pages
164-172
Publisher
Elsevier Current Trends
Description
Highlights
- Neuronal oscillations exhibit non-Gaussian heavy-tailed probability distributions.
- The diversity of observed non-Gaussian statistics implies a plurality of mechanisms.
- Different physiological principles underpin different heavy-tailed distributions.
- Macroscopic non-Gaussian statistics imply that correlations persist across scales.
- This argues against any scale being privileged over others.
Fluctuating oscillations are a ubiquitous feature of neurophysiology. Are the amplitude fluctuations of neural oscillations chance excursions drawn randomly from a normal distribution, or do they tell us more? Recent empirical research suggests that the occurrence of ‘anomalous’(high amplitude) oscillations imbues their probability distributions with a heavier tail than the standard normal distribution. However, not all heavy tails are the same. We provide canonical examples of different heavy-tailed distributions in cortical …
Scholar articles
JA Roberts, TW Boonstra, M Breakspear - Current opinion in neurobiology, 2015