  Many studies have found evidence that the brain operates at a critical point,
a processus known as self-organized criticality. A recent paper found
remarkable scalings suggestive of criticality in systems as different as neural
cultures, anesthetized or awake brains. We point out here that the diversity of
these states would question any claimed role of criticality in information
processing. Furthermore, we show that two non-critical systems pass all the
tests for criticality, a control that was not provided in the original article.
We conclude that such false positives demonstrate that the presence of
criticality in the brain is still not proven and that we need better methods
that scaling analyses.
