Integrated information structure collapses with anesthetic loss of conscious arousal in Drosophila melanogaster.
PLoS Computational Biology February 1, 2021 Angus Leung, Dror Cohen, Bruno van Swinderen et al.
Consciousness may arise from integrated patterns of causal interactions among neurons, measurable as an informational structure. In fruit flies, integrated interactions among neuronal populations during wakefulness collapsed into isolated clusters under anesthesia. Informational structures distinguished wakeful from anesthetized states more accurately than a simpler scalar measure. Rich information structures, which cannot arise from purely feedforward systems, occurred across the fly brain and collapsed uniformly during anesthesia. The concept of an informational structure may serve as a useful measure for level of consciousness.