Metastable Oscillatory Modes as a Signature of Entropy Management in the Brain

Entropy management, central to the Free Energy Principle, requires a process that temporarily shifts brain activity toward states of lower or higher entropy. Metastable synchronization is a process by which a system achieves entropy fluctuations by intermittently transitioning between states of collective order and disorder. Previous work has shown that collective oscillations, similar to those recorded from the brain, emerge spontaneously from weakly stable synchronization in critically coupled oscillator systems. However, direct evidence linking the formation of collective oscillations to entropy fluctuations is lacking. In this short communication, we demonstrate how the emergence of Metastable Oscillatory Modes (MOMs) is directly associated with a temporary reduction in entropy in the ongoing dynamics. We apply Shannon entropy to the distribution of eigenvalues of phase covariance over sliding time windows, capturing the temporal evolution of entropy at the level of the entire dynamical system. By demonstrating how the formation of MOMs impacts a system’s entropy levels, we bridge theoretical works on the physics of coupled oscillators with the FEP framework, supporting the hypothesis that brain rhythms recorded experimentally are a signature of entropy management.