General anesthesia reduces complexity and temporal asymmetry of the informational structures derived from neural recordings in<i>Drosophila</i>

Munoz, Roberto N.; Leung, Angus; Zecevik, Aidan; Pollock, Felix A.; Cohen, Dror; Swinderen, Bruno van; Tsuchiya, Naotsugu; Modi, Kavan

doi:10.1103/physrevresearch.2.023219

Cited by 21 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 59 publications

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“…Some have argued that consciousness is intimately tied to action, and could be construed as providing a frame of reference for agents' interactions with the world (Clark, 2016;Land, 2012;Merker, 2005). As such, it may be found (in a very rudimentary form) in simpler organisms (Baars, 2005;Merker, 2005), perhaps including invertebrates (Barron & Klein, 2016;Muñoz et al, 2020). Nonetheless, the nature of consciousness and its functional relationship with action are still a matter of active debate.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evidence that instrumental conditioning requires conscious awareness in humans

et al. 2021

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Instrumental conditioning is a crucial substrate of adaptive behaviour, allowing individuals to selectively interact with the stimuli in their environment to maximise benefit and minimise harm. The extent to which complex forms of learning, such as instrumental conditioning, are possible without conscious awareness is a topic of considerable importance and ongoing debate. In light of recent theoretical and empirical contributions casting doubt on the early demonstrations of unconscious instrumental conditioning, we revisit the question of its feasibility in two modes of conditioning. In Experiment 1, we used trace conditioning, following a prominent paradigm (Pessiglione et al., 2008) and enhancing its sensitivity. Success in this task requires participants to learn to approach rewardpredictive stimuli and avoid punishment-predictive stimuli through monetary reinforcement. All stimuli were rendered unconscious using forward-backward masking. In Experiment 2, we used delay conditioning to shorten the stimulus-outcome delay, retaining the structure of the original task but presenting the stimuli under continuous flash suppression to allow for an overlap of the stimulus, action, and outcome, as well as replacing monetary reinforcement with primary appetitive reinforcement. In both experiments, we found evidence for absence of unconscious instrumental conditioning, showing that participants were unable to learn to adjust their behaviour to approach positive stimuli and avoid negative ones. This result is consistent with evidence that unconscious stimuli fail to bring about long-term behavioural adaptations, and provides empirical evidence to support theoretical proposals that consciousness might be necessary for adaptive behaviour, where selective action is required.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evidence that instrumental conditioning requires conscious awareness in humans

et al. 2021

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“…The OPN can be thought of as an approximation of the idea of an ε -machine [ 55 , 56 ], which provides an optimal approximation of a dynamical system based on output data. Previous work using ε -machines to explore the effects of anaesthesia on neural dynamics in insects found that temporal complexity and information asymmetry are strongly altered by loss of consciousness [ 57 ], which suggests that these kinds of statistical state-transition analyses can be informative. Combining this information-theoretic formalism provided by Hoel et al [ 52 , 54 ].…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Topological analysis of differential effects of ketamine and propofol anaesthesia on brain dynamics

et al. 2021

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Research has found that the vividness of conscious experience is related to brain dynamics. Despite both being anaesthetics, propofol and ketamine produce different subjective states: we explore the different effects of these two anaesthetics on the structure of dynamic attractors reconstructed from electrophysiological activity recorded from cerebral cortex of two macaques. We used two methods: the first embeds the recordings in a continuous high-dimensional manifold on which we use topological data analysis to infer the presence of higher-order dynamics. The second reconstruction, an ordinal partition network embedding, allows us to create a discrete state-transition network, which is amenable to information-theoretic analysis and contains rich information about state-transition dynamics. We find that the awake condition generally had the ‘richest’ structure, visiting the most states, the presence of pronounced higher-order structures, and the least deterministic dynamics. By contrast, the propofol condition had the most dissimilar dynamics, transitioning to a more impoverished, constrained, low-structure regime. The ketamine condition, interestingly, seemed to combine aspects of both: while it was generally less complex than the awake condition, it remained well above propofol in almost all measures. These results provide deeper and more comprehensive insights than what is typically gained by using point-measures of complexity.

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“…Finally, the study of complex systems requires the quantification of two key properties: diversity and emergence. The first one can be described by a measure of entropy, for example, Shannon’s entropy (e.g., Σ i p i log p i where p i is the probability of state i ), or variations of it including the excess entropy (Crutchfield and Feldman 2003; Grassberger 1986) and the entropy rate—this being closely related to the Lempel-Ziv complexity (Schartner and others 2017) and the statistical complexity of epsilon machines (Muñoz and others 2020; Shalizi and Crutchfield 2001). The second one, emergence, is a unique attribution of complex systems; the availability of one such measure would be a key tool in understanding the information flows between the various hierarchies/layers of neural models.…”

Section: The Toolsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Complex Systems Perspective on Neuroimaging Studies of Behavior and Its Disorders

et al. 2021

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The study of complex systems deals with emergent behavior that arises as a result of nonlinear spatiotemporal interactions between a large number of components both within the system, as well as between the system and its environment. There is a strong case to be made that neural systems as well as their emergent behavior and disorders can be studied within the framework of complexity science. In particular, the field of neuroimaging has begun to apply both theoretical and experimental procedures originating in complexity science—usually in parallel with traditional methodologies. Here, we illustrate the basic properties that characterize complex systems and evaluate how they relate to what we have learned about brain structure and function from neuroimaging experiments. We then argue in favor of adopting a complex systems-based methodology in the study of neuroimaging, alongside appropriate experimental paradigms, and with minimal influences from noncomplex system approaches. Our exposition includes a review of the fundamental mathematical concepts, combined with practical examples and a compilation of results from the literature.

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General anesthesia reduces complexity and temporal asymmetry of the informational structures derived from neural recordings inDrosophila

Cited by 21 publications

References 59 publications

Evidence that instrumental conditioning requires conscious awareness in humans

Evidence that instrumental conditioning requires conscious awareness in humans

Topological analysis of differential effects of ketamine and propofol anaesthesia on brain dynamics

A Complex Systems Perspective on Neuroimaging Studies of Behavior and Its Disorders

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