Neuronal Avalanches: Critical Brain Dynamics

This simulator renders a 3D lattice of roughly 1,700 model neurons as a discrete branching process, the same framework Beggs and Plenz used in 2003 to describe cascades of activity recorded in cortical slices. Each firing neuron independently activates each of its neighbours with a probability set by the branching parameter σ, so σ directly controls whether cascades of firing ("neuronal avalanches") die out quickly, sustain themselves at all scales, or explode into runaway activity. Drag σ across the critical point at 1.0 and watch avalanche sizes swing between small and exponentially bounded, scale-free and unpredictable, or seizure-like and unbounded, while live readouts track the current cascade, the measured branching ratio, and how many avalanches have completed.