What is general anesthesia? ... You’re unconscious; you’re not supposed to remember; it’s nice if it doesn’t hurt; it’s good if you’re not moving around while the surgeons are operating. And if you take those first four things by themselves, they’re synonymous with death. On that long list of things that are not cool, that’s not cool. This next part is where we sort of earn our money… we keep the patient alive.
– Dr. Emery N. Brown
What is general anesthesia? What does brain activity look like in a patient under anesthesia? How is anesthesia different from sleep? Dr. Emery Brown answers these questions and more as he convinces a Brown University audience that general anesthesia is no mystery. Dr. Brown is a professor of Computational Neuroscience at MIT and a professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School. His November 13 th lecture at Brown University is a part of Brown's presidential lecture series Thinking Out Loud: Deciphering Mysteries of Our World and Beyond. Dr. Brown's lecture is the second in the series. The first lecture was given by Dr. John Johnson. Read about our discussion with Dr. Johnson here.