Entropy-complexity characterization of brain development in chickens

Abstract

Electroencephalography (EEG) reflects the electrical activity of the brain, which can be considered chaotic and ruled by a nonlinear dynamics. Chickens exhibit a protracted period of maturation, and this temporal separation of the synapse formation and maturation phases is analogous to human neural development, though the changes in chickens occur in weeks compared to years in humans. The development of synaptic networks in the chicken brain can be regarded as occurring in two broadly defined phases. We specifically describe the chicken brain development phases in the causality entropy-complexity plane H×C, showing that the complexity of the electrical activity can be characterized by estimating the intrinsic correlational structure of the EEG signal. This allows us to identify the dynamics of the developing chicken brain within the zone of a chaotic dissipative behavior in the plane H×C.