Department of Physics, University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, Fayetteville, United States.
Elife. 2023 Jan 27;12:e79950. doi: 10.7554/eLife.79950.
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.
自然发生的身体运动和集体神经活动都表现出复杂的动力学特性，通常具有无标度、分形的时空结构。大脑和行为的无标度动力学都很重要，因为它们都与生物体的功能益处有关。尽管它们有相似之处，但无标度脑活动和无标度行为是分开研究的，没有一个统一的解释。在这里，我们表明，老鼠行为和视觉皮层神经元的无标度动力学密切相关。令人惊讶的是，无标度神经活动仅限于特定的神经元子集，而这些无标度子集与其他神经子集表现出随机的胜者通吃竞争。这一观察结果与源自临界假设的神经系统无标度动力学的流行理论不一致。我们开发了一个计算模型，该模型包含了已知的细胞类型特异性电路结构，用一种新的临界动力学来解释我们的发现。我们的研究结果为无标度行为提供了神经基础，并明确了无标度神经活动的行为相关性。
