Empirical and theoretical aspects of generation and transfer of information in a neuromagnetic source network

Variability in source dynamics across the sources in an activated network may be indicative of how the information is processed within a network. Information-theoretic tools allow one not only to characterize local brain dynamics but also to describe interactions between distributed brain activity. This study follows such a framework and explores the relations between signal variability and asymmetry in mutual interdependencies in a data-driven pipeline of non-linear analysis of neuromagnetic sources reconstructed from human magnetoencephalographic (MEG) data collected as a reaction to a face recognition task. Asymmetry in non-linear interdependencies in the network was analyzed using transfer entropy, which quantifies predictive information transfer between the sources. Variability of the source activity was estimated using multi-scale entropy, quantifying the rate of which information is generated. The empirical results are supported by an analysis of synthetic data based on the dynamics of coupled systems with time delay in coupling. We found that the amount of information transferred from one source to another was correlated with the difference in variability between the dynamics of these two sources, with the directionality of net information transfer depending on the time scale at which the sample entropy was computed. The results based on synthetic data suggest that both time delay and strength of coupling can contribute to the relations between variability of brain signals and information transfer between them. Our findings support the previous attempts to characterize functional organization of the activated brain, based on a combination of non-linear dynamics and temporal features of brain connectivity, such as time delay.