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Arousal tunes neuronal avalanches across a directed percolation critical point

Brandon R. Munn1,2,*, Christopher Whyte2, Eli J. Müller1,2, and James M. Shine2

  • *Contact author: brandon.munn@sydney.edu.au
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Phys. Rev. E 114, 024403 – Published 18 August, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/xby9-6mtn

Abstract

Neuromodulatory levels in the brain change moment to moment, yet are typically ignored in studies of neural criticality, where empirical support remains varied. Here we show in a biophysical network of bursting neurons that arousal acts as a mechanistic control parameter for a directed percolation phase transition. At intermediate arousal, neuronal activity exhibits peaked susceptibility, power-law avalanche size and duration distributions, universal shape collapse, and anomalous diffusion, jointly satisfying the hyperscaling relation of the 2+1-dimensional directed percolation universality class. Reanalyzing extracellular recordings in awake mice, we find that time-resolved susceptibility tracks pupil-inferred arousal as the model predicts. These results identify arousal as a physiological control parameter for neural criticality, offering a statistical-physics basis for the Yerkes-Dodson effect, and imply that arousal should be tracked at fine temporal resolution to obtain reliable empirical estimates of neural criticality.

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Outline

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Phys. Rev. E 114, 024403– Published 18 August, 2026
  • Received 22 October 2025
  • Accepted 5 June 2026
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