Is structural criticality required for contactome complexity and how does it relate to function?

Determine whether structural criticality in brain anatomy is required to generate the complex structure observed in neural contactome networks and characterize how such structural criticality relates to brain function.

Background

The authors highlight recent reports of structural criticality in the same volumetric datasets and argue that universal anatomical properties may strongly influence both contactome and connectome organization. They propose that accurate spatial or physical generative models of the contactome are central to explaining the observed exponential distance dependence across species.

They explicitly identify as open the question of whether structural criticality underlies the complex contactome structure and how this potential mechanism connects to functional aspects of the brain.