Emergence of local irreversibility in complex interacting systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates how local irreversibility and the arrow of time emerge in complex systems by decomposing entropy production into individual and interaction components, revealing the role of pairwise interactions especially in neural activity.

Contribution

It introduces a decomposition method for local entropy production into independent and interaction terms, applied to biological and neural systems to understand irreversibility.

Findings

Neural activity can define the arrow of time even without external inputs.

Pairwise interactions among neurons are the main contributors to irreversibility.

The method applies to models of cellular sensing, logical computations, and neural responses.

Abstract

Living systems are fundamentally irreversible, breaking detailed balance and establishing an arrow of time. But how does the evident arrow of time for a whole system arise from the interactions among its multiple elements? We show that the local evidence for the arrow of time, which is the entropy production for thermodynamic systems, can be decomposed. First, it can be split into two components: an independent term reflecting the dynamics of individual elements and an interaction term driven by the dependencies among elements. Adapting tools from non--equilibrium physics, we further decompose the interaction term into contributions from pairs of elements, triplets, and higher--order terms. We illustrate our methods on models of cellular sensing and logical computations, as well as on patterns of neural activity in the retina as it responds to visual inputs. We find that neural activity can define the arrow of time even when the visual inputs do not, and that the dominant contribution to this breaking of detailed balance comes from interactions among pairs of neurons.