Topic: coarse-graining

Michael Breakspear and Mac Shine examine how neural dynamics change from individual cells to whole-brain systems. Their work connects gain modulation with the balance between integration and segregation, relates it to arousal pathways, and uses coarse-graining to investigate both scale-dependent coding and shared dynamical properties across neural populations.

Physics offers countless examples for which theoretical predictions are astonishingly powerful. But it’s hard to imagine a similar precision in complex systems where the number and interdependencies between components simply prohibits a first-principles approach, look no further than the challenge of the billions of neurons and trillions of connections within our own brains. In such settings how do we even identify the important theoretical questions? We describe a systems-scale perspective in which we integrate information theory, dynamical systems and statistical physics to extract understan