Social dynamics in the context of "Pierre Bourdieu"

In social dynamics, critical mass is a sufficient number of adopters of a new idea, technology or innovation in a social system so that the rate of adoption becomes self-sustaining and creates further growth. The point at which critical mass is achieved is sometimes referred to as a threshold within the threshold model of statistical modeling.

The term "critical mass" is borrowed from nuclear physics, where it refers to the amount of a substance needed to sustain a chain reaction. Within social sciences, critical mass has its roots in sociology and is often used to explain the conditions under which reciprocal behavior is started within collective groups, and how reciprocal behavior becomes self-sustaining. Recent technology research in platform ecosystems shows that apart from the quantitative notion of a “sufficient number”, critical mass is also influenced by qualitative properties such as reputation, interests, commitments, capabilities, goals, consensuses, and decisions, all of which are crucial in determining whether reciprocal behavior can be started to achieve sustainability to a commitment such as an idea, new technology, or innovation.

Neural coding (or neural representation) refers to the relationship between a stimulus and its respective neuronal responses, and the signalling relationships among networks of neurons in an ensemble. Action potentials, which act as the primary carrier of information in biological neural networks, are generally uniform regardless of the type of stimulus or the specific type of neuron. The simplicity of action potentials as a methodology of encoding information factored with the indiscriminate process of summation is seen as discontiguous with the specification capacity that neurons demonstrate at the presynaptic terminal, as well as the broad ability for complex neuronal processing and regional specialisation for which the brain-wide integration of such is seen as fundamental to complex derivations; such as intelligence, consciousness, complex social interaction, reasoning and motivation. As such, theoretical frameworks that describe encoding mechanisms of action potential sequences in relationship to observed patterns are seen as fundamental to neuroscientific understanding.