Uncovering the Mechanisms of General Anesthesia: Where Neuroscience Meets Statistics
General anesthesia is a drug-induced, reversible condition involving unconsciousness, amnesia (loss of memory), analgesia (loss of pain sensation), akinesia (immobility), and hemodynamic stability. I will describe a primary mechanism through which anesthetics create these altered states of arousal. Our studies have allowed us to give a detailed characterization of the neurophysiology of loss and recovery of consciousness, in the case of propofol, and we have demonstrated that the state of general anesthesia can be rapidly reversed by activating specific brain circuits. The success of our research has depended critically on tight coupling of experiments, statistical signal processing and mathematical modeling.Reception to follow in the M3 Atrium
Emery N. Brown is the Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School; an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH); and the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience at MIT. He is the Associate Director of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science at MIT and the Co-Director of the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Program. Dr. Brown received his BA (magna cum laude) in Applied Mathematics from Harvard College, his MA and PhD in statistics from Harvard University and his MD (magna cum laude) from Harvard Medical School. Dr. Brown completed his internship in internal medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and his anesthesiology residency at MGH. Dr. Brown is an anesthesiologist statistician whose experimental research has made fundamental contributions to understanding the neuroscience of how anesthetics create the states of general anesthesia. He is also widely recognized for his development of statistical methods to analyze dynamic processes in neuroscience.