Propofol anesthesia destabilizes neural dynamics across cortex
Adam Eisen, Leo Kozachkov, Andre Bastos, Jacob Donoghue, Meredith Mahnke, Scott Brincat, Sarthak Chandra, Emery Brown, Ila Fiete, Earl Miller · COSYNE 2023
Sun, Mar 12, 2023
Anesthesia is ubiquitous in hospitals, yet a mechanistic understanding of how anesthetic drugs induce unconsciousness is lacking. A prominent hypothesis suggests that dynamic stability is critical to cortical function: awake brains are poised at a state that is sufficiently excitable for activity generation and propagation, yet controllable and stable. Measuring dynamic stability during the transition from consciousness to anesthetic unconsciousness could identify the neural mechanisms disrupted by anesthesia, and thus provide insight into the neural basis of consciousness. Related work sugges