TY - JOUR T1 - Increased Brain Signal Variability Accompanies Lower Behavioral Variability in Development A1 - McIntosh, Anthony Randal A1 - Kovacevic, Natasa A1 - Itier, Roxane J. Y1 - 2008/07/04 N2 - Author SummaryIntuitive notions of brain–behavior relationships would suggest that because children show more variability in behavior, their brains should also be more variable. We demonstrate that this is not the case. In measuring brain signal variability with EEG and behavior in a simple face recognition task, we found that brain signal variability increases in children from 8–15 y and is even higher in young adults. Importantly, we show that this increased brain variability correlates with reduced behavioral variability and more accurate performance. A brain that has more variability also has greater complexity and a greater capacity for information processing. The implication of our findings is that variability in brain signals, or what some would call noise, is actually a critical feature of brain function. For the brain to operate at an optimal level, a certain amount of internal noise is necessary. In a certain way it could be stated that a noisy brain is a healthy brain. JF - PLOS Computational Biology JA - PLOS Computational Biology VL - 4 IS - 7 UR - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000106 SP - e1000106 EP - PB - Public Library of Science M3 - doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000106 ER -