Parameter choices do not qualitatively change the biological interpretation of our information entropy measure.

Cohen’s d statistic [29] comparing distributions of entropy values for cellular calcium activity of (a) stage 14 and stage 18 Xenopus laevis embryos, (b) stage 18 and stage 22 Xenopus laevis embryos, (c) stage 14 and stage 22 Xenopus laevis embryos, and (d) mature retrotrapezoid nucleus neurons from embryonic mice in pH 7.4 solution vs. pH 7.2 solution (data in (d) obtained from [15]). At large values of n and k, a sign change in d value occurs which is a technical artifact arising from there being more entries in the transition matrix than can be filled by data from our time series. The numerical values of d which generated this figure can be found in S2 Table.