What it is
The behavioral effects of anesthetics are highly conserved across species, hinting at shared, fundamental mechanisms. The authors compiled a dataset of neural activity recorded at multiple scales during wakefulness and anesthesia in humans, macaques, marmosets, mice, zebrafish and nematodes, and characterized local neural dynamics across more than 6,000 time-series features. This revealed a profile of anesthesia that is conserved across species: shorter intrinsic timescales of neural activity and dampened synchrony between brain regions. Deep-brain stimulation of the centromedian thalamus in macaques reversed this profile and restored behavioral responsiveness.
Why it matters
The authors conclude that anesthesia has a shared neural endpoint: across species and scales, anesthetics induce spatiotemporal isolation of local neural activity. The conserved profile covaries with conserved transcriptional profiles (patterns of gene expression) of excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmission, and biophysical modeling provides a potential mechanistic link between this large-scale signature and the effects of key molecular targets on the timescales of synaptic excitation and inhibition.
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Filed underNeural dynamics and brain function, Anesthesia and Neurotoxicity Research, Neuroscience and Neuropharmacology Research