Time-varying synergy/redundancy dominance in the human cerebral cortex

Abstract Recent work has emphasized the ubiquity of higher-order interactions in brain function. These interactions can be characterized as being either redundancy or synergy-dominated by applying tools from multivariate information theory. Though recent work has shown the importance of both synergistic and redundant interactions to brain function, their dynamic structure is still unknown. Here we analyze the moment-to-moment synergy and redundancy dominance of the fMRI BOLD signal during rest for 95 unrelated subjects to show that redundant and synergistic interactions have highly structured dynamics across many interaction sizes. The whole brain is strongly redundancy-dominated, with some subjects never experiencing a whole-brain synergistic moment. In small sets of brain regions, our analyses reveal that subsets which are redundancy dominated on average exhibit the most complex dynamic behavior as well as the most synergistic and most redundant time points. In accord with previous work, these regions frequently belong to a single coherent functional system, and our analysis reveals that they become synergistic when that functional system becomes momentarily disintegrated. Although larger subsets cannot be contained in a single functional network, similar patterns of instantaneous disintegration mark when they become synergistic. At all sizes of interaction, we find notable temporal structure of both synergy and redundancy-dominated interactions. We show that the interacting nodes change smoothly in time and have significant recurrence. Both of these properties make time-localized measures of synergy and redundancy highly relevant to future studies of behavior or cognition as time-resolved phenomena.