Brain Organization into Resting State Networks Emerges at Criticality on a Model of the Human Connectome

Abstract

The relation between large-scale brain structure and function is an outstanding open problem in neuroscience. We approach this problem by studying the dynamical regime under which realistic spatiotemporal patterns of brain activity emerge from the empirically derived network of human brain neuroanatomical connections. The results show that critical dynamics unfolding on the structural connectivity of the human brain allow the recovery of many key experimental findings obtained from functional magnetic resonance imaging, such as divergence of the correlation length, the anomalous scaling of correlation fluctuations, and the emergence of large-scale resting state networks.