Astrocyte-induced positive integrated information in neuroglial ensembles

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that astrocytes can induce positive integrated information in neuroglial networks, highlighting their crucial role in information exchange and proposing a general spiking-bursting mechanism for this phenomenon.

Contribution

It introduces an analytical and numerical framework showing astrocytes' essential role in generating positive integrated information in neuroglial ensembles, with a novel spiking-bursting mechanism.

Findings

Astrocytes contribute to positive integrated information in neuronal ensembles.

The spiking-bursting mechanism explains the generation of integrated information.

The mechanism is shown to be generic beyond neuroglial networks.

Abstract

The Integrated Information is a quantitative measure from information theory how tightly all parts of a system are interconnected in terms of information exchange. In this study we show that astrocyte, playing an important role in regulation of information transmission between neurons, may contribute to a generation of positive Integrated Information in neuronal ensembles. Analytically and numerically we show that the presence of astrocyte may be essential for this information attribute in neuro-astrocytic ensembles. Moreover, the proposed "spiking-bursting" mechanism of generating positive Integrated Information is shown to be generic and not limited to neuroglial networks, and is given a complete analytic description.