Wikimedia, Gordana Adamovic-MladenovicThe neuroscience of unconsciousness just became a little clearer. Recording brainwaves via electrodes embedded in the brains of human patients at the precise moment that a common, general anesthetic knocked them unconscious, researchers found that neuron activity switched from rapid, cross-brain chatter to slow, uncoordinated waves of firing.
The study, published today (November 5) in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, supports a link between consciousness and coordinated communication in the brain, said Mélanie Boly of the Belgian National Fund of Scientific Research, who was not involved in the study. “When you really look at the fine-grain dynamics of the [neural] networks, you can see that the slow oscillation”—which appears at the moment consciousness is lost—“is disrupting brain connectivity,” she said, and those oscillations could one day be used in the clinic to monitor the unconsciousness of patients under anesthetics.
In the study, a team of researchers, measured neuron activity in three epileptic patients, who’d had electrodes implanted in their brains to help doctors understand what was causing their seizures. Each patient ...
