Consciousness and anesthesia.

What about Memory, Consciousness, Recall, and Awareness in Anesthesia?

Integrating the science of consciousness and anesthesia.

The nature and mechanism of human consciousness is emerging as one of the most important scientific and philosophical questions of the 21st century. Disregarded as a subject of serious inquiry throughout most of the 20th century, it has now regained legitimacy as a scientific endeavor. The investigation of consciousness and the mechanisms of general anesthesia have begun to converge. In the pre...

Sleep and Anesthesia

The supplement within this volume of The Open Anesthesiology Journal focuses on emerging links between sleep and anesthesia. Sleep is the natural periodic suspension of consciousness during which the powers of the body are restored. General anesthesia is a drug-induced, reversible condition comprised of five behavioral states: hypnosis (loss of consciousness), amnesia, analgesia, and immobility...

Unresponsiveness ≠ unconsciousness.

Consciousness is subjective experience. During both sleep and anesthesia, consciousness is common, evidenced by dreaming. A defining feature of dreaming is that, while conscious, we do not experience our environment; we are disconnected. Besides inducing behavioral unresponsiveness, a key goal of anesthesia is to prevent the experience of surgery (connected consciousness), by inducing either un...

Propofol induction reduces the capacity for neural information integration: implications for the mechanism of consciousness and general anesthesia.

The cognitive unbinding paradigm suggests that the synthesis of neural information is attenuated by general anesthesia. Here, we analyzed the functional organization of brain activities in the conscious and anesthetized states, based on functional segregation and integration. Electroencephalography (EEG) recordings were obtained from 14 subjects undergoing induction of general anesthesia with p...

Genuine and Spurious Phase Synchronization Strengths during Consciousness and General Anesthesia

Spectral content in a physiological dataset of finite size has the potential to produce spurious measures of coherence. This is especially true for electroencephalography (EEG) during general anesthesia because of the significant alteration of the power spectrum. In this study we quantitatively evaluated the genuine and spurious phase synchronization strength (PSS) of EEG during consciousness, ...