Consciousness and anesthesia
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Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China

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    Abstract:

    The definition of consciousness can be described as "a brain basic function that an individual realizes oneself in a real world (environment)." This is to say, consciousness works for human to perceive the reality of oneself and the environment under wakefulness. The perception of the reality is a brain fundamental function for attention, learning, cognition and thinking, etc. So far, many scientific laboratories study human consciousness related with anesthesia because they attempt to reveal how consciousness works when brain reboots awareness. Recently, Solovey and colleagues (J Neurosci, 2015, 35(30): 10866) found that different anesthetics induce different patterns of brain activity. Loss of consciousness is universally and reliably associated with stabilization of cortical dynamics regardless of the specific activity characteristics.To give an analogy, their analyses suggest that loss of consciousness is akin to depressing the damper pedal on the piano, which makes the sounds dissipate quicker regardless of the specific melody being played. Here is a suggestion that the consciousness under the basic metabolism should be observed when a person just awake from asleep state, because s/he just realizes herself or himself in a real world, without disturbance from those of drugs for anesthesia of brain.

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HE Rong-Qiao. Consciousness and anesthesia[J]. Progress in Biochemistry and Biophysics,2015,42(10):972

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History
  • Received:September 30,2015
  • Revised:September 30,2015
  • Accepted:October 14,2015
  • Online: October 21,2015
  • Published: October 20,2015