Cortical Entropy, Mutual Information and Scale-Free Dynamics in Waking Mice

Some neural circuits operate with simple dynamics characterized by one or a few well-defined spatiotemporal scales (e.g. central pattern generators). In contrast, cortical neuronal networks often exhibit richer activity patterns in which all spatiotemporal scales are represented. Such "scale-fr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. 1991) N.Y. 1991), 2016-10, Vol.26 (10), p.3945-3952
Main Authors: Fagerholm, Erik D, Scott, Gregory, Shew, Woodrow L, Song, Chenchen, Leech, Robert, Knöpfel, Thomas, Sharp, David J
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Anesthesia
Animals
Cerebral Cortex - drug effects
Cerebral Cortex - physiology
Cluster Analysis
Information Theory
Markov Chains
Mice, Transgenic
Neural Pathways - drug effects
Neural Pathways - physiology
Optical Imaging
Optogenetics
Original
Pyramidal Cells - drug effects
Pyramidal Cells - physiology
Rest
Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted
Wakefulness - drug effects
Wakefulness - physiology
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Summary:Some neural circuits operate with simple dynamics characterized by one or a few well-defined spatiotemporal scales (e.g. central pattern generators). In contrast, cortical neuronal networks often exhibit richer activity patterns in which all spatiotemporal scales are represented. Such "scale-free" cortical dynamics manifest as cascades of activity with cascade sizes that are distributed according to a power-law. Theory and in vitro experiments suggest that information transmission among cortical circuits is optimized by scale-free dynamics. In vivo tests of this hypothesis have been limited by experimental techniques with insufficient spatial coverage and resolution, i.e., restricted access to a wide range of scales. We overcame these limitations by using genetically encoded voltage imaging to track neural activity in layer 2/3 pyramidal cells across the cortex in mice. As mice recovered from anesthesia, we observed three changes: (a) cortical information capacity increased, (b) information transmission among cortical regions increased and (c) neural activity became scale-free. Our results demonstrate that both information capacity and information transmission are maximized in the awake state in cortical regions with scale-free network dynamics.
ISSN:1047-3211
1460-2199
DOI:10.1093/cercor/bhw200