The Integrated Information is a quantitative measure from information theory how tightly all parts of a system are interconnected in terms of information exchange. In this study we show that astrocyte, playing an important role in regulation of information transmission between neurons, may contribute to a generation of positive Integrated Information in neuronal ensembles. Analytically and numerically we show that the presence of astrocyte may be essential for this information attribute in neuro-astrocytic ensembles. Moreover, the proposed "spiking-bursting" mechanism of generating positive Integrated Information is shown to be generic and not limited to neuroglial networks, and is given a complete analytic description.
@article{arxiv.1808.02788,
title = {Astrocyte-induced positive integrated information in neuroglial ensembles},
author = {Oleg Kanakov and Susanna Gordleeva and Anastasia Ermolaeva and Sarika Jalan and Alexey Zaikin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.02788},
year = {2019}
}