PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Tomer Fekete
AU  - Hermann Hinrichs
AU  - Jacobo Diego Sitt
AU  - Hans-Jochen Heinze
AU  - Oren Shriki
TI  - Multiscale criticality measures as general-purpose gauges of proper brain function
AID  - 10.1101/863431
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 863431
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/12/03/863431.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/12/03/863431.full
AB  - The brain is universally regarded as a system for processing information. If so, any behavioral or cognitive dysfunction should lend itself to depiction in terms of information processing deficiencies. Information is characterized by recursive, hierarchical complexity. The brain accommodates this complexity by a hierarchy of large/slow and small/fast spatiotemporal loops of activity. Thus, successful information processing hinges upon tightly regulating the spatiotemporal makeup of activity, to optimally match the underlying multiscale delay structure of such hierarchical networks. Reduced capacity for information processing will then be expressed as deviance from this requisite multiscale character of spatiotemporal activity. This deviance is captured by a general family of multiscale criticality measures (MsCr). We applied MsCr to MEG and EEG data in four telling degraded information processing scenarios: disorders of consciousness, mild cognitive impairment, schizophrenia and preictal activity. Consistently with our previous modeling work, MsCr measures systematically varied with information processing capacity. MsCr measures might thus be able to serve as general gauges of information processing capacity and, therefore, as normative measures of brain health.