Interesting, but that article -- Ma et al. (2019) "Cortical Circuit Dynamics Are Homeostatically Tuned to Criticality In Vivo" [https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(19)30737-8)] -- makes no mention of Karl Friston and his work (who is also mentioned elsewhere in this thread: @Agebor, re: 'Bayesian brain'), which seems highly relevant.
E.g.
* Friston, K. (2009). The Free-Energy Principle: A Rough Guide to the Brain? Trends in cognitive sciences, 13(7), 293-301.
* Solms M (2018) "The Hard Problem of Consciousness and the Free Energy Principle." Front. Psychol. 9: 2714. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02714 | PMCID: PMC6363942 | PMID: 30761057
"The activity of a brain—or even a small region of a brain devoted to a particular task—cannot be just the summed activity of many independent neurons. Here we use methods from statistical physics to describe the collective activity in the retina as it responds to complex inputs such as those encountered in the natural environment. We find that the distribution of messages that the retina sends to the brain is very special, mathematically equivalent to the behavior of a material near a critical point in its phase diagram."
E.g.
* Friston, K. (2009). The Free-Energy Principle: A Rough Guide to the Brain? Trends in cognitive sciences, 13(7), 293-301.
https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/The%20free-energy%20prin...
* Friston, K. (2010) The Free-Energy Principle: A Unified Brain Theory?. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. 11(2): 127.
https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/The%20free-energy%20prin...
* Solms M (2018) "The Hard Problem of Consciousness and the Free Energy Principle." Front. Psychol. 9: 2714. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02714 | PMCID: PMC6363942 | PMID: 30761057
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6363942/
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0271...