In a new paper with implications for preventing Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological disorders, Keith Hengen, PhD, an associate professor of biology, suggests a new comprehensive approach to understanding how the brain works and the rules it must follow to reach optimal performance.
“There’s a common perception that the human brain is the most complicated thing in the universe,” Hengen said. “The brain is immensely powerful, but that power may arise from a relatively simple set of mathematical principles.”
Hengen starts with the premise that almost everything our brains do is learned or powerfully shaped by experience. In other words, we aren’t born with hard-wired circuits preprogrammed to help us read, drive cars, or do anything else that we do every day. A healthy brain must be ready to learn anything and everything.
But how is a collection of neurons capable of learning? Hengen suggests that brains become learning machines only when they reach a special state called “criticality.” A concept borrowed from physics, criticality describes a complex system that is at the tipping point between order and chaos. At this razor’s edge, brains are primed to gain new information, Hengen said. “Brains need to reach criticality to think, remember, and learn.”
Hengen proposed criticality as a unifying theory of brain function and disease in the prestigious journal Neuron. Woodrow Shew, a physicist at the University of Arkansas, is the co-author.