Excitatory-inhibitory branching process: A parsimonious view of cortical asynchronous states, excitability, and criticality Corral López, Roberto Buendía, Víctor Muñoz Martínez, Miguel Ángel We acknowledge the Spanish Ministry and Agencia Estatal de investigación (AEI) through Project of I + D+i Ref. PID2020-113681GB-I00, financed by MICIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and FEDER “A way to make Europe,” as well as the Consejería de Conocimiento, Investigación Universidad, Junta de Andalucía and European Regional Development Fund, Project references A-FQM-175-UGR18 and P20-00173, for financial support. R.C.L. acknowledges funding from the Spanish Ministry and AEI, Grant No. FPU19/03887. This work was partially supported by a Sofja Kovalevskaja Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, endowed by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (V.B.). We also thank H. C. Piuvezam, J. Pretel, G. B. Morales, P. Moretti, O. Vinogradov, and E. Giannakakis for valuable discussions. The branching process is the minimal model for propagation dynamics, avalanches, and criticality, broadly used in neuroscience. A simple extension of it, adding inhibitory nodes, induces a much-richer phenomenology, including an intermediate phase, between quiescence and saturation, that exhibits the key features of “asynchronous states” in cortical networks. Remarkably, in the inhibition-dominated case, it exhibits an extremely rich phase diagram that captures a wealth of nontrivial features of spontaneous brain activity, such as collective excitability, hysteresis, tilted avalanche shapes, and partial synchronization, allowing us to rationalize striking empirical findings within a common and parsimonious framework. 2022-12-02T10:59:46Z 2022-12-02T10:59:46Z 2022-11-14 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Roberto Corral López, Víctor Buendía, and Miguel A. Muñoz Phys. Rev. Research 4, L042027 [https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.4.L042027] https://hdl.handle.net/10481/78252 10.1103/PhysRevResearch.4.L042027 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Atribución 4.0 Internacional American Physical Society