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The framework of criticality provides a unifying perspective on neuronal dynamics from in vitro cortical cultures to functioning human brains. Recent findings suggest that a healthy cortex displays critical dynamics, giving rise to scale-free spatiotemporal cascades of activity, termed neuronal avalanches. Pharmacological manipulations of the excitation-inhibition balance (EIB) in cortical cultures were previously shown to result in deviations from criticality and from the power law scaling of avalanche size distribution. To examine the sensitivity of neuronal avalanche metrics to altered EIB in humans, we focused on epilepsy, a neurological disorder characterized by hyperexcitable networks. Using magnetoencephalography, we quantitatively assessed deviations from criticality in the brain dynamics of patients with epilepsy during interictal (between-seizures) activity. Compared with healthy control subjects, epilepsy …