Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-2023
Keywords
scale-free; cerebral cortex; behavior; Mouse
Abstract
Naturally occurring body movements and collective neural activity both exhibit complex dynamics, often with scale-free, fractal spatiotemporal structure. Scale-free dynamics of both brain and behavior are important because each is associated with functional benefits to the organism. Despite their similarities, scale-free brain activity and scale-free behavior have been studied separately, without a unified explanation. Here, we show that scale-free dynamics of mouse behavior and neurons in the visual cortex are strongly related. Surprisingly, the scale-free neural activity is limited to specific subsets of neurons, and these scale-free subsets exhibit stochastic winner-take-all competition with other neural subsets. This observation is inconsistent with prevailing theories of scale-free dynamics in neural systems, which stem from the criticality hypothesis. We develop a computational model which incorporates known cell-type-specific circuit structure, explaining our findings with a new type of critical dynamics. Our results establish neural underpinnings of scale-free behavior and clear behavioral relevance of scale-free neural activity.
Citation
Jones, S. A., Barfield, J. H., Norman, V. K., & Shew, W. L. (2023). Scale-Free Behavioral Dynamics Directly Linked with Scale-Free Cortical Dynamics. eLife, 12, e79950. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.79950
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.