Measuring the level of consciousness based on the amount of integrated information
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1
RIKEN, Brain Science Institute, Japan
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2
University of Wisconsin - Madison, United States
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3
Monash University, Australia
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4
Japan Science and Technology Agency, Japan
According to the integrated information theory of consciousness, the amount of integration information, which is defined within the framework of information theory, is correlated with the level of consciousness. The theory has been indirectly supported by recent clinical observations and experimental evidences showing that various forms of loss of consciousness such as anesthesia, dreamless sleep, and vegetative state results from disintegration of information in the brain. Thus, measuring the exact amount of integrated information based on the real neuronal data would be tremendously important in clinics, and it would be also theoretically very interesting as it may solve the mystery of consciousness. However, integrated information in any realistic organisms has been extremely difficult to compute due to several computational and experimental challenges. Here, we propose a novel practical measure to quantify the integrated information. We applied our new measure to the electrocorticogram (ECoG) data simultaneously recorded with 128 electrodes in four monkeys before and after injection of anesthetic drugs to test whether the amount of integrated information actually drops when consciousness is lost. We found that when the monkey lost consciousness, the integrated information in 8-24Hz sharply dropped as the theory predicted. Our results imply that the low-frequency activity across the brain might serve to integrate information, the degree of which might be correlated with the level of consciousness.
Keywords:
Consciousness,
Integrated information,
Anesthesia,
electrocorticography (ECoG),
monkey,
Information Theory
Conference:
ACNS-2012 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Conference, Brisbane, Australia, 29 Nov - 2 Dec, 2012.
Presentation Type:
Oral Presentation
Topic:
Other
Citation:
Oizumi
M,
Yanagawa
T,
Amari
S,
Tsuchiya
N and
Fujii
N
(2012). Measuring the level of consciousness based on the amount of integrated information.
Conference Abstract:
ACNS-2012 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Conference.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2012.208.00075
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Received:
25 Oct 2012;
Published Online:
07 Nov 2012.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Masafumi Oizumi, RIKEN, Brain Science Institute, Wako-City, Saitama, 351-0198, Japan, c-oizumi@g.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.jp