Here's How The Human Brain Reboots Itself After The Deep Sleep of Anesthesia

It can take a while for your laptop to boot up, so you may have spent hours wondering what it was up to. The question of how the human brain restarts after being anesthetized, in a coma, or in a deep sleep has been asked by scientists.

A group of 30 healthy adults who were anesthetized for three hours, and a group of 30 healthy adults who weren't as a control measure, reveal some insights into how the brain drags itself back into consciousness.

The functions that come back online the fastest are the ones handled by the prefrontal cortex. The brain areas that manage reaction time and attention take longer.

Max Kelz, an anesthesiologist from the University of Pennsylvania, said that it makes sense in evolutionary terms that higher cognitive needs to recover early.

If someone woke up to a threat, the prefrontal cortex would be important for categorizing the situation and coming up with an action plan.

Before and after going under, a variety of methods were used to measure what was happening in the brain. Reaction speed, memory recall, and other skills were measured.

As the brain began to recover, the researchers noted that the frontal regions of the brain were particularly active.

It took about three hours for those who had been anesthetized to recover.

The team followed up with the group participants about their sleep schedules after the experiment. Those who had been anesthetized did not appear to have a negative effect on their sleeping patterns.

The healthy human brain is resilient, even with a long exposure to deep anesthesia, according to an anesthesiologist from Washington University.

It suggests that some of the disorders of cognitive functioning that we often see for days or even weeks during recovery from anesthesia and surgery may be due to factors other than the effects of anesthesia on the brain.

In the case of a coma, anesthesia is an effective and controlled way of turning off consciousness in the brain, something that can happen involuntarily.

Even if we have figured out how to use them safely, we don't really understand how anesthetics work. There are lots of ideas about how the brain deals with drugs, but no concrete evidence.

The recent findings can not only help with treatments and patient care, but also give scientists a better understanding of the brain and how it responds to disruption.

George Mashour, an anesthesiologist from the University of Michigan, said how the brain recovers from states of unconsciousness is important clinically but also gives us insight into the neural basis of consciousness itself.

The research was published.

The first version of this study was published in May of 2021.