Anesthesia is an important tool for exploring human consciousness, but scientists still aren’t quite sure how it works, despite using it on patients for 170 years. A new study analyzes the brain under ...

Even though doctors have been using general anesthesia for nearly 200 years, they haven’t really understood the details of ...

In a New York Times article, Emery Neal Brown, MD, a professor of anesthesiology at Harvard Medical School and a practicing physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, answered questions about how ...

Our brains constantly work to make predictions about what’s going on around us, for instance to ensure that we can attend to and consider the unexpected. A new study examines how this works during ...

Over 350 million surgeries are performed globally each year. For most of us, it's likely at some point in our lives we'll have to undergo a procedure that needs general anesthesia. Even though it is ...

When patients undergo general anesthesia, doctors can choose among several drugs. Although each of these drugs acts on neurons in different ways, they all lead to the same result: a disruption of the ...

Study: Different Anesthetics Cause Different Brain Activity A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine recently found that different anesthetic drugs create different patterns in the ...

It's wild to think that we've grown organs in labs, built robots that can perform surgery, and started producing mind-controlled prosthetics, but we still don't know exactly how anesthesia works, or ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: For decades, one of the best tools for probing the nature of human consciousness has been medicine’s most reliable method for switching it off: ...