You lie back , and a nursemaid fits a mask over your face . Somebody tells you to count back from 100 . Your eyelids grow grave . The next thing you know , you ’re awaken up . We thought we knew why this happens , but new research published in the journalPLOS Computational Biologysuggests we may have had it wrong .
The brains of the great unwashed on general anaesthesia are far quieter than those of family line who have n’t been drugged . Previous survey have suggested that this quieting happens when anesthesia interferes with conversation , or couplings , between different part of our wit . Less information is exchange , and the volume of the conversation drops .
It seemed like a solid enough account . But a team of German neuroscientists see a possible fault in the system of logic . The amount of selective information being switch over often depends on the amount of information uncommitted , not on the metier of the connecter .
To explore this teaser further , they brought two distaff ferret into the lab and knock off them up to mind activity monitors . ( Ferret brains’similarityto primates ’ makes them a honest lab substitute for humans , at least in initial subject area . )
Both black-footed ferret cash in one’s chips through three round of anesthesia and recovery , receive slightly more of the drug each time as the scientists watched their mentality get , process , and convert information .
As in previous studies , the conversations in the black-footed ferret ’ nous were indeed more quiet while they were anesthetized . But it was n’t encumbrance that quieted their brain . The wit regions that ordinarily do the listening were just as dynamic as usual . But the talkative brainiac region seemed to have less to say . They were make and sending less information .
lede author Patricia Wollstadt is a neuroscientist at the Brain Imaging Center at Goethe University Frankfurt . " The relevance of this alternative account goes beyond anaesthesia research , ” shesaidin a statement , " since each and every examination of neuronal information transfer should unconditionally take into consideration how much information is usable locally and is therefore also transferable . "
