In recent years, neuroscientists have noticed a remarkable pattern in the way neurons fire in brain samples. This activity seems to occur in avalanches which vary in size with a distribution that is scale invariant.
Scale invariance is a somewhat counterintuitive phenomenon. It means that the scale at which you examine data makes no difference to the distribution you observe. In other words, the distribution looks exactly the same whether you look at it close up or from far away.
Scientists have seen this kind of behaviour, called criticality, in all kinds of systems: the size of earthquakes, forest fires, epidemics and so on--all have the same kind of distribution.
It occurs in systems that are delicately balanced between inactivity, where the changes are always small, to a state of overactivity where any change tends to be runaway.
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