In neuroscience, the critical brain hypothesis states that certain biological neuronal networks work near phase transitions.
These results, and subsequent replication on a number of settings, led to the hypothesis that the collective dynamics of large neuronal networks in the brain operates close to the critical point of a phase transition.
Discussion on the brain's criticality have been done since 1950, with the paper on the imitation game for a Turing test.
[9] In 1995, Andreas V. Herz and John Hopfield noted that self-organized criticality (SOC) models for earthquakes were mathematically equivalent to networks of integrate-and-fire neurons, and speculated that perhaps SOC would occur in the brain.
[12] In 2003, the hypothesis found experimental support by John M. Beggs and Dietmar Plenz.