Can computational sciences help anaesthesiologists in their daily work? How much do we understand general anaesthesia and the effects it has on the brain? Do we really need to accept that we simply feel groggy after waking up from general anaesthesia?

As Professor brown explains, the general idea about anaesthesiology is, that nobody knows how it works, although it is done daily, in the US alone around 60 000 times. By employing EEG it is possible for Prof. Brown and his colleagues to determine very precisely how specific drugs effect specific parts of the brain, showing unique patterns in the EEG. Common misconception about their complexity is refuted by Prof. Brown, explaining that reading an EEG is not much more complex than say reading a ECG. He also explains that the choice between general anaesthesia and local one is based on medically relevant factors, not on the wish of the patients. He also gives a brief introduction in his early research on the circadian clock and its changes due to light adjustments. Of course I had to ask about those scary cases when people felt their surgeries since they were not in a induced reversible coma, but they could not move. Prof. Brown shed some light on these cases.

Guest: Emery Neal Brown, M.D., Ph.D. is an American statistician, neuroscientist, and anesthesiologist. He is the Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School and at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH)

Host: Michal Hulik, psychologist