The brain near the edge

When viewed at a certain coarse grain, the brain seems a relatively small dynamical system composed by a few dozen interacting areas, performing a number of stereotypical behaviors. It is known that, even relatively small dynamical systems can reliably generate robust and flexible behavior if they are located near a second order phase transition, because of the abundance of metastable states at the critical point. The approach pursued here assumes that some of the most fundamental properties of the functioning brain are possible because it is spontaneously located at the border of such instability. In this notes we review the motivation, the arguments and recent results as well as the implications of this view of the functioning brain.