ArticlePLoS computational biology2021
Integrated information structure collapses with anesthetic loss of conscious arousal in Drosophila melanogaster.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 44 citations in OpenAlex.
- Quantum Superpositions of Conscious States in a Minimal Integrated Information Model.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Characteristics of electroencephalographic changes induced by different hypnotics in elderly patients: a narrative review.Korean journal of anesthesiology · 2026Review
- Cortical connectivity, local dynamics and stability correlates of global conscious states.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Wakefulness can be distinguished from general anesthesia and sleep in flies using a massive library of univariate time series analyses.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Capturing the emergent dynamical structure in biophysical neural models.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Decrease and recovery of integrated information Φ during anesthesia and sleep on human functional magnetic resonance imaging.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2025Article
- Upper bounds for integrated information.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Anesthesia and the neurobiology of consciousness.Neuron · 2024Review
- Multivariate classification of multichannel long-term electrophysiology data identifies different sleep stages in fruit flies.Science advances · 2024Article
- Exploring effects of anesthesia on complexity, differentiation, and integrated information in rat EEG.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2024Article
- Multivariate classification of multichannel long-term electrophysiology data identifies different sleep stages in fruit flies.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Neural Ensemble Fragmentation in the AnesthetizedThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- When do parts form wholes? Integrated information as the restriction on mereological composition.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2023Article
- Separating weak integrated information theory into inspired and aspirational approaches.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2023Review
- Different Approximation Methods for Calculation of Integrated Information Coefficient in the Brain during Instrumental Learning.Brain sciences · 2022Article
- Emergence of Integrated Information at Macro Timescales in Real Neural Recordings.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Synthetic Biology: Old and New Dilemmas-The Case of Artificial Life.Biotech (Basel (Switzerland)) · 2021Article
- Topological analysis of differential effects of ketamine and propofol anaesthesia on brain dynamics.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- Growing evidence for separate neural mechanisms for attention and consciousness.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2021Review
- A relational approach to consciousness: categories of level and contents of consciousness.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The physical basis of consciousness remains one of the most elusive concepts in current science. One influential conjecture is that consciousness is to do with some form of causality, measurable through information. The integrated information theory of consciousness (IIT) proposes that conscious experience, filled with rich and specific content, corresponds directly to a hierarchically organised, irreducible pattern of causal interactions; i.e. an integrated informational structure among elements of a system. Here, we tested this conjecture in a simple biological system (fruit flies), estimating the information structure of the system during wakefulness and general anesthesia. Consistent with this conjecture, we found that integrated interactions among populations of neurons during wakefulness collapsed to isolated clusters of interactions during anesthesia. We used classification analysis to quantify the accuracy of discrimination between wakeful and anesthetised states, and found that informational structures inferred conscious states with greater accuracy than a scalar summary of the structure, a measure which is generally championed as the main measure of IIT. In stark contrast to a view which assumes feedforward architecture for insect brains, especially fly visual systems, we found rich information structures, which cannot arise from purely feedforward systems, occurred across the fly brain. Further, these information structures collapsed uniformly across the brain during anesthesia. Our results speak to the potential utility of the novel concept of an "informational structure" as a measure for level of consciousness, above and beyond simple scalar values.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.