If youve ever had a medical procedure that required general anesthesia, you know its a trippy experience.
A team of MIT neuroscientists may have unlocked the answer in the case of propofol.
Propofol has been commonly used since the 1980s to put and keep patients in a state of unconsciousness.
How general anesthetic puts people under has long been a mystery. A new study from MIT sheds light on how propofol affects the brain.© Robert Kneschke via Shutterstock
They then compared those measurements to some that were taken before propofol was administered.
But under the effects of propofol, the brain did some odd things.
The brain has to operate on this knifes edge between excitability and chaos.
Propofol seems to disrupt the mechanisms that keep the brain in that narrow operating range.
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