Statistical Physics Models for Zebrafish Neural Dynamics
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The brain is a complex system consisting of 10^11 neurons and over 10^14 connections. Theories of criticality from statistical physics can provide insight into systems of this size, and ask whether the brain is in fact critical. I outline my work where we developed numerical simulations of ideal models of criticality with the random field Ising model, and compared the observed dynamics to single-cell resolution calcium imaging data of the zebrafish brain. We investigated how sub-sampling and finite sized systems change self-organized criticality metrics such as power laws and universal scale.