Organized chaos in the head
Commonly, chaos is an undesirable state that is also considered unreliable. However, the fact that chaos can also be beneficial is suggested by the latest investigations of the research group "Theory of multi-scale neuronal networks". Prof. Moritz Helias (JARA-BRAIN) and his team discovered that both chaos and order exist in biological neuronal networks. Reliable communication is thus possible despite chaotic states. Indeed, chaotic networks are even better suited for classifying certain patterns. Moreover, compared to artificial neural networks, the chaos in biological networks leads to a shorter processing time.
In an interview, Christian Keup, scientist of the research group, revealed interesting background information about chaos in neural networks: https://www.fz-juelich.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/UK/EN/2021/2021-06-30-interview-keup.html
The results of the research were recently published in the journal Physical Review X: https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.11.021064