The mind near the edge: A novel view of brain function

It is almost intuitive the notion that systems that are near the edge between order and disorder behave differently. This idea led several of us to argue, since the last millennium, that the most fundamental properties of the functioning brain are only possible because it is spontaneously located at the border of an instability (see [1-4]). It is this mix of order and disorder that allows the brain to be a brain. In this talk we review the motivation and then describe experimental results supporting this hypothesis both in health and disease, at various brain scales ranging from a few millimeters up to the entire brain cortex.