Roberts James A, Boonstra Tjeerd W, Breakspear Michael
QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, 300 Herston Rd, Herston, QLD 4006, Australia.
School of Psychiatry, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia; Black Dog Institute, Hospital Road, Randwick, NSW 2031, Australia; MOVE Research Institute, VU University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Curr Opin Neurobiol. 2015 Apr;31:164-72. doi: 10.1016/j.conb.2014.10.014. Epub 2014 Nov 15.
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 oscillations and discuss the corresponding mechanisms that each suggest, ranging from criticality to multistability, memory, bifurcations, and multiplicative noise. Their existence suggests that the brain is a strongly correlated complex system that employs many different functional mechanisms, and that likewise, we as scientists should refrain from methodological monism.
波动振荡是神经生理学中普遍存在的特征。神经振荡的幅度波动是从正态分布中随机抽取的偶然偏移，还是能告诉我们更多信息呢？最近的实证研究表明，“异常”（高幅度）振荡的出现使其概率分布具有比标准正态分布更重的尾部。然而，并非所有重尾都是相同的。我们提供了皮质振荡中不同重尾分布的典型例子，并讨论了每种分布所暗示的相应机制，从临界性到多稳态、记忆、分岔和乘性噪声。它们的存在表明大脑是一个高度相关的复杂系统，采用了许多不同的功能机制，同样，作为科学家的我们应该避免方法论上的一元论。
