Figure 3

(a) The correlation length of the interacting model scales linearly with the system size, as in the data. In the extrinsic model, as expected, the correlation length of the fluctuations is constant and equal to 1, i.e., the correlation function drops to zero for adjacent electrodes. (b) Comparison between the mutual information in the extrinsic model (\(\theta = 1\), \(\gamma _D = 10\), \(\gamma _1 = 0.1\), \(\gamma _2 = 0.5\)) and, as an example, in the interacting model with two units. Notice that the onset of a non-vanishing mutual information induced by \({\mathscr{D}}(t)\) is also the onset of power-law distributed avalanches, whereas the mutual information arising from interactions is independent of \({\mathscr{D}^{*}}\).