Information theoretic evidence for layer- and frequency-specific changes in cortical information processing under...

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Computational Neuroscience
• Systems Neuroscience

Background:

• Neural computation is distributed across animal nervous systems.
• Information processing involves storage, transfer, and modification.
• Neural dynamics exhibit rhythms, suggesting links to information processing components.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce a novel spectrally-resolved measure of active information storage (AIS).
• To investigate how anesthesia modulates AIS across different frequency bands, cortical layers, and brain regions.
• To link rhythmic neural activity to information storage during altered states of consciousness.

Main Methods:

• Intracortical recordings of neural activity in ferrets.
• Analysis of neural activity before and after loss of consciousness (LOC) induced by anesthesia.
• Calculation of spectrally-resolved active information storage (AIS).

Main Results:

• Anesthesia specifically modulates AIS in different frequency bands (gamma, alpha/beta).
• Frequency-specific AIS modulation varies across cortical layers (supergranular vs. infragranular).
• Increased frontal alpha/delta power during LOC impacts AIS: alpha AIS decreases, delta AIS increases.

Conclusions:

• Spectrally-resolved AIS provides frequency-specific insights into neural information processing.
• Anesthesia induces layer- and frequency-specific changes in information storage.
• Changes in neural rhythms during loss of consciousness are linked to altered local information processing.