Emergence of Dynamic Patterns

Some of the brain's most striking behaviours don't live in any single neuron — they emerge from the way large numbers of simple units interact. A seizure, a travelling wave, a moment of brain-wide synchrony: none is written into an individual cell, yet all arise reliably from local interactions between many. Understanding the brain therefore means understanding emergence — how collective patterns appear at one scale that can't be read off from the parts below.

In this research stream we study that jump from microscale activity to macroscale dynamics directly. Across recordings from the zebrafish brain to the human brain under different conditions, we apply statistical-physics approaches such as maximum-entropy models and dynamic causal modelling to ask how local interactions give rise to brain-wide behaviour — and which simple rules are sufficient to reproduce the patterns we observe.