Cinematic Operation of the Cerebral Cortex Interpreted via Critical Transitions in Self-Organized Dynamic Systems

Measurements of local field potentials over the cortical surface and the scalp of animals and human subjects reveal intermittent bursts of beta and gamma oscillations. During the bursts, narrow-band metastable amplitude modulation (AM) patters emerge for a fraction of a second and ultimately dissolve to the broad-band random background activity. The burst process depends on previously learnt conditioned stimuli (CS), thus different AM patterns may emerge in response to different CS. This observation leads to our cinematic theory of cognition when perception happens in discrete steps manifested in the sequence of AM patterns. Our article summarizes findings in the past decades on experimental evidence of cinematic theory of cognition and relevant mathematical models. We treat cortices as dissipative systems that self-organize themselves near a critical level of activity that is a non-equilibrium metastable state. Criticality is arguably a key aspect of brains in their rapid adaptation, reconfiguration, high storage capacity, and sensitive response to external stimuli. Self-organized criticality (SOC) became an important concept to describe neural systems. We argue that transitions from one AM pattern to the other require the concept of phase transitions, extending beyond the dynamics described by SOC. We employ random graph theory (RGT) and percolation dynamics as fundamental mathematical approaches to model fluctuations in the cortical tissue. Our results indicate that perceptions are formed through a phase transition from a disorganized (high entropy) to a well-organized (low entropy) state, which explains the swiftness of the emergence of the perceptual experience in response to learned stimuli.