Interplay between local and global critical states in the brain

The brain is a complex system organized across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Emergent cortical oscillations and slowly evolving largescale functional states coordinate the fast neuronal spiking activity. Concurrently, the firing of a few neurons has the potential to reshape the organization of billions of others. In between these macro- and microscopic levels of observation, recurrent motifs are observed at several mesoscopic scales. Recently, it has been conjectured that the brain might operate at the edge of a phase transition, due to accumulating evidence of scale-free behavior in neuronal activity. Here, we will explore the interaction between critical states at different scales of a modelled neuronal network, to set the bases to understand how the brain may extract from this operating mode functional advantages such as efficiency in information elaboration and transmission