Mechanisms of Flexible Information Sharing through Noisy Oscillations

Abstract

Brain areas must be able to interact and share information in a time-varying, dynamic manner on a fast timescale. Such flexibility in information sharing has been linked to the synchronization of rhythm phases between areas. One definition of flexibility is the number of local maxima in the delayed mutual information curve between two connected areas. However, the precise relationship between phase synchronization and information sharing is not clear, nor is the flexibility in the face of the fixed structural connectivity and noise. Here, we consider two coupled oscillatory excitatory-inhibitory networks connected through zero-delay excitatory connections, each of which mimics a rhythmic brain area. We numerically compute phase-locking and delayed mutual information between the phases of excitatory local field potential (LFPs) of the two networks, which measures the shared information and its direction. The flexibility in information sharing is shown to depend on the dynamical origin of oscillations, and its properties in different regimes are found to persist in the presence of asymmetry in the connectivity as well as system heterogeneity. For coupled noise-induced rhythms (quasi-cycles), phase synchronization is robust even in the presence of asymmetry and heterogeneity. However, they do not show flexibility, in contrast to noise-perturbed rhythms (noisy limit cycles), which are shown here to exhibit two local information maxima, i.e., flexibility. For quasi-cycles, phase difference and information measures for the envelope-phase dynamics obtained from previous analytical work using the Stochastic Averaging Method (SAM) are found to be in good qualitative agreement with those obtained from the original dynamics. The relation between phase synchronization and communication patterns is not trivial, particularly in the noisy limit cycle regime. There, complex patterns of information sharing can be observed for a single value of the phase difference. The mechanisms reported here can be extended to I-I networks since their phase synchronizations are similar. Our results set the stage for investigating information sharing between several connected noisy rhythms in neural and other complex biological networks.