Bocconi Researcher Breaks New Ground on Rhythms and Noise

When fireflies flash in harmony or neurons fire in coordinated bursts, it’s not because they’re following a conductor’s cue. In the messy real world, synchronization happens without instructions, often in noisy and unpredictable conditions. Until now, scientists lacked the mathematical tools to fully explain how these systems align their rhythms in the face of randomness.

Victor Buendía, a postdoc researcher at Bocconi University, has changed that. In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, Buendía presents a new framework to describe synchronization in systems affected by noise—a common feature in everything from brain activity to superconductors.

“Most people think noise just adds disorder,” Buendía says. “But in some cases, it can actually help a system organize itself. Noise can have really surprising effects”

The breakthrough was born from necessity: Buendía was studying brain dynamics. Theoretical researchers believe that critical transitions—extremely fluctuating points at the edge between order and disorder—might be essential to understanding the processing of information in the brain. But existing mathematical techniques broke down under noisy conditions. His new theory bypasses these limits by tracking how small fluctuations affect collective behavior when many individuals are present in the system.

The implications are vast. In neuroscience, for example, so-called “neural mass models” are widely used to study disorders like epilepsy or Parkinson’s disease, where abnormal synchronization plays a major role. Buendía’s framework offers a way to refine these models by incorporating noise more realistically, potentially aiding diagnosis and treatment.

The research marks a leap forward in a field first shaped by pioneers like Yoshiki Kuramoto—recently honored with the Boltzmann Medal—whose foundational equations laid the groundwork for modern synchronization theory. As Buendía’s work shows, the story is far from over.