Tipping Point in the Brain

First of all, the title has been stolen. Some days ago, I read an article in Scientific American about the 'Tipping point' in brain. The article was very enlightening and quite interesting. In a nutshell, it stated that there are instances when the regular communication between neurons [which is like every two people talking different things with each other in a crowd of many-many (really very large) people] is 'paused' and all the neurons synchronize (cohere) and are concerned with only one message. The voltage measured using electrode array increases. Also, the voltage at different parts of the brain increase and look similar - depicting that these regions are synchronized at that instant of time. This was compared to the idea of 'tipping point' wherein an idea requires an enough(critical) number of people to be spread to after which the idea just spreads like a BOOM. So, the author points out how society is also a pseudo-neuronal network.

Well, I felt this conclusion to be very cool. But is this speciality of similarity only between brain and society, or can it be between other groups of many objects that interact with their small subgroup of neighbours but also show peculiar wholesome characterstics. One example that I can think of is - lets take many atoms in a tube. So, the atoms interact with each other within a small region of influence. Now, if we have small pulses of synchronized motion, then if the motion is hard enough (enough speed and number of atoms) , then the pulses may become a trend - a tipping point effect, I guess.
Who knows such tipping effects might be taking place at all levels and this is the ultimate scalability and self similarity of nature?

Also, as tipping effect, can we attach other characterisitcs that are similar to brain and society? One of the major puzzules is consiousness. People have always talked about the consciousness of a society - But it was always discussed in philosophical or economic way. We can now talk about consioussness in more scientific way after this 'Coherence' effect in brain.

Another nice but wierd analogy which could be found is the 6 degrees of freedom in the society. According to it, we know every other person on earth via 6 people in between on average. (Like A knows B, B knows C has 1 degree of freedom between A and C). So, is this true for brain? This could also explain why there was almost instant synchonisation between geographically distant parts of brain. This explanation could save the terms used by the author the article like 'long neurons'.



Another important doubt that arises in my mind is about the use of word 'pause' used in the article. What does it
really mean? Does this mean that they revive their activities once the message has been processed? If the revival is not exact, does it mean that the message affected the talking between individual cells that was going on? So, if the talking between the cells was taken to be independent of message before it came, then where is that talking place now? If nowhere, then it means that independent talking only gave rise to the message. Dude, what the hell is happening up there?