BI 216 Woodrow Shew and Keith Hengen: The Nature of Brain Criticality

Woodrow Shew and Keith Hengen on critical brain dynamics and cognition, learning, and development.

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A few episodes ago, episode 212, I conversed with John Beggs about how criticality might be an important dynamic regime of brain function to optimize our cognition and behavior. See that here:    • BI 212 John Beggs: Why Brains Seek the Edg...  

Today we continue and extend that exploration with a few other folks in the criticality world.
Woodrow Shew is a professor and runs the Shew Lab at the University of Arkansas. Keith Hengen is an assistant professor and runs the Hengen Lab at Washington University in St. Louis Missouri. Together, they are Hengen and Shew on a recent review paper in Neuron, titled Is criticality a unified setpoint of brain function? In the review they argue that criticality is a kind of homeostatic goal of neural activity, describing multiple properties and signatures of criticality, they discuss multiple testable predictions of their thesis, and they address the historical and current controversies surrounding criticality in the brain, surveying what Woody thinks is all the past studies on criticality, which is over 300. And they offer a account of why many of these past studies did not find criticality, but looking through a modern lens they most likely would. We discuss some of the topics in their paper, but we also dance around their current thoughts about things like the nature and implications of being nearer and farther from critical dynamics, the relation between criticality and neural manifolds, and a lot more. You get to experience Woody and Keith thinking in real time about these things, which I hope you appreciate.
There's quite a bit more in the full patreon version of this episode. Consider supporting brain inspired if you want all the full episodes, the full archive as well, or just to express how you value this podcast bringing you these kinds of thoughtful conversations.


0:00 - Intro
3:41 - Collaborating
6:22 - Criticality community
14:47 - Tasks vs. Naturalistic
20:50 - Nature of criticality
25:47 - Deviating from criticality
33:45 - Sleep for criticality
38:41 - Neuromodulation for criticality
40:45 - Criticality Definition part 1: scale invariance
43:14 - Criticality Definition part 2: At a boundary
51:56 - New method to assess criticality
56:12 - Types of criticality
1:02:23 - Value of criticality versus other metrics
1:15:21 - Manifolds and criticality
1:26:06 - Current challenges