Generally, the behaviour of biological and cognitive systems is not steadily poised at one phase or another. Instead, living beings operate around points of critical activity, at the boundary separating ordered and disordered dynamics. Critical activity, or criticality, refers to a distinctive set of properties found at this transition. Some of these properties include the presence of a wide range of scales of activity and maximal sensitivity to external fluctuations1,2, facilitating systems at criticality to present optimal responses when facing complex heterogeneous environments3. The surprising fact is that, unlike unanimated matter where critical transitions from order to disorder take place by fine-tuning of the parameters of the system1, living systems appear to be ubiquitously poised near critical points4. For instance, signatures of criticality have been detected in neural cultures5, immune receptor proteins6, the network of genes controlling morphogenesis in fly embryos7 and bacterial clustering8. Indicators of critical behaviour have also been observed in the brain9 and cognitive behavioural patterns10.