Chimera states and the critical brain hypothesis

Joern Davidsen

Understanding the principles and mechanisms underlying complex brain function and cognition is one of the major challenges of our time and essential to tackle brain related diseases such as Alzheimer’s and epilepsy. The field of network neuroscience aims to tackle this challenge by an intuitively appealing framework that allows one to map experimental observations to a mathematical description rooted in graph theory where different brain regions (or individual neurons) correspond to nodes in a graph and links between them represent interactions. Within this graph theoretical framework, some brain related phenomena – such as sleep as well as brain related diseases such as epilepsy – have recently been linked to the mathematical concept of chimera states. In general, chimera states are hybrid states characterized by the coexistence of localized synchronized and unsynchronized dynamics in a given system. Indeed, the name chimera is used here in analogy to the hybrid creature in Greek mythology. Such coexisting behavior can even occur in a homogeneous network, thus breaking the underlying symmetry – something that was long thought to be impossible. While over the last 20 years a significant theoretical understanding of this phenomenon has started to emerge, experimental realizations remain scarce and the relevance of the phenomenon in technology and in nature remains to be established – leaving many challenges and fundamental issues to be addressed, including the potential biological function of chimera states in neuroscience. In this talk, I will focus on the latter and present recent advances, which also tie the notion of chimera states to the critical brain hypothesis.

 Overview  Program