Quasicriticality or Criticality in the brain?*

Recent experimental studies (Fontenele et. al. 2019) show that critical exponents for size and duration distributions of avalanches in cortical activity are scattered across, clustering around a dynamical critical scaling relation line. Had one assumed these samples were in critical states and all brains, across species, belong to the same universality class, then we should have only observed one point on that scaling line. So, why do experiments show a spread of points along the scaling line, even within the same species? The quasicriticality hypothesis (Williams-Garcia et al. 2014) states that the brain operates in a quasicritical state, which allows optimal information processing, given external stimulus. We conjecture that those experimental results are consistent with quasicriticality. We further show evidence, by performing numerical simulations of our cortical branching model (CBM), of quasicirticality. Thus, the quasicriticality hypothesis is consistent with the observed scattered data along the dynamical critical scaling relation line.