The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory?

After initially presenting evidence that the electrical activity recorded from the brain surface can reflect metastable state transitions of neuronal configurations at the mesoscopic level, I will suggest that their patterns may correspond to the distinctive spatio-temporal activity in the dynamic core (DC) and the global neuronal workspace (GNW), respectively, in the models of the Edelman group on the one hand, and of Dehaene-Changeux, on the other. In both cases, the recursively reentrant activity flow in intra-cortical and cortical-subcortical neuron loops plays an essential and distinct role. Reasons will be given for viewing the temporal characteristics of this activity flow as signature of self-organized criticality (SOC), notably in reference to the dynamics of neuronal avalanches. This point of view enables the use of statistical physics approaches for exploring phase transitions, scaling and universality properties of DC and GNW, with relevance to the macroscopic electrical activity in EEG and EMG.