Waypoints To Consciousness: After Anesthesia, How Brains Restart With Everything Intact
Sunday, June 22, 2014 - 10:10
in Psychology & Sociology
Anesthesia works, we know that. Properly done, patients can be temporarily rendered completely unresponsive during surgery and then wake up again, with their memories and skills intact. Improperly done, of course, can be very bad. But little is understood about the processes used by structurally normal brains to navigate from unconsciousness back to consciousness. Anesthesia leads the world in retracted papers. Previous research has shown that the anesthetized brain is not "silent" under surgical levels of anesthesia but experiences certain patterns of activity, and it spontaneously changes its activity patterns over time. read more