TY - JOUR
T1 - Emergence of local irreversibility in complex interacting systems
AU - Lynn, Christopher W.
AU - Holmes, Caroline M.
AU - Bialek, William
AU - Schwab, David J.
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank S. E. Palmer for helpful discussions and for guiding us through the data of Ref. . This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation, through the Center for the Physics of Biological Function (PHY-1734030) and a Graduate Research Fellowship (C.M.H.); by the National Institutes of Health through the BRAIN initiative (R01EB026943); by the James S. McDonnell Foundation through a Postdoctoral Fellowship Award (C.W.L.); by the Simons Foundation; and by a Sloan Research Fellowship (D.J.S.).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 American Physical Society.
PY - 2022/9
Y1 - 2022/9
N2 - Living systems are fundamentally irreversible, breaking detailed balance and establishing an arrow of time. But how does the evident arrow of time for a whole system arise from the interactions among its multiple elements? We show that the local evidence for the arrow of time, which is the entropy production for thermodynamic systems, can be decomposed. First, it can be split into two components: an independent term reflecting the dynamics of individual elements and an interaction term driven by the dependencies among elements. Adapting tools from nonequilibrium physics, we further decompose the interaction term into contributions from pairs of elements, triplets, and higher-order terms. We illustrate our methods on models of cellular sensing and logical computations, as well as on patterns of neural activity in the retina as it responds to visual inputs. We find that neural activity can define the arrow of time even when the visual inputs do not, and that the dominant contribution to this breaking of detailed balance comes from interactions among pairs of neurons.
AB - Living systems are fundamentally irreversible, breaking detailed balance and establishing an arrow of time. But how does the evident arrow of time for a whole system arise from the interactions among its multiple elements? We show that the local evidence for the arrow of time, which is the entropy production for thermodynamic systems, can be decomposed. First, it can be split into two components: an independent term reflecting the dynamics of individual elements and an interaction term driven by the dependencies among elements. Adapting tools from nonequilibrium physics, we further decompose the interaction term into contributions from pairs of elements, triplets, and higher-order terms. We illustrate our methods on models of cellular sensing and logical computations, as well as on patterns of neural activity in the retina as it responds to visual inputs. We find that neural activity can define the arrow of time even when the visual inputs do not, and that the dominant contribution to this breaking of detailed balance comes from interactions among pairs of neurons.
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U2 - 10.1103/PhysRevE.106.034102
DO - 10.1103/PhysRevE.106.034102
M3 - Article
C2 - 36266789
AN - SCOPUS:85138263040
SN - 2470-0045
VL - 106
JO - Physical Review E
JF - Physical Review E
IS - 3
M1 - 034102
ER -