Thesis Project Form

Over the last decade, numerous signatures of criticality have been identified in brain activity. Some of the most striking examples are the probability distributions of size and duration for intermittent spontaneous activity bursts during ongoing activity in the cortex. Most observations on local field potentials have remained confined at the ultra-slow or broad-band low-frequency activity despite the technical possibilities to extend the results beyond gamma oscillations.

This thesis aims to extend current observation of scale-free neuronal dynamics and avalanches to higher frequency range in the human cortex leveraging intra-cranial data recorded undergoing pre-surgical evaluations. The thesis requires the construction of advanced data processing techniques for the estimation of avalanche size distributions and long-range temporal correlations from intra-cerebral recordings.

The candidates will learn about self-organized criticality concepts and how to analyse SEEG data to characterize the dynamical properties of neuronal avalanches.