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Anesthetics, drugs that reduce sensation or, in the case of general anesthetics, awareness, help doctors minimize the pain and discomfort experienced by patients during surgeries or other procedures. Many anesthetics produce similar behavioral changes in different species, suggesting that they affect their brains similarly.

Researchers at the University of Oxford, McGill University, the NeuroSpin Center and other institutions worldwide recently tried to further explore this possibility by examining the signals produced by nerve cells (i.e., neural activity) across six different species under anesthesia.

Their findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, suggest that anesthesia produces a shared pattern of neural activity, with shorter-lasting local fluctuations and reduced coordination between different regions of the nervous system across all six species.

"Anesthesia is a fascinating phenomenon that was invented by humans less than two centuries ago to allow surgery to be performed in comfortable conditions," Andrea I. Luppi and Bechir Jarraya, first author and co-senior author of the paper, respectively, told Medical Xpress.

"Remarkably, anesthesia works in species that are extremely diverse, separated by over 700 million years of evolution: from a worm to a human, the same drug can make us immobile and asleep. Many different anesthetics can have this effect, even though the molecules themselves are very different."

Luppi, Jarraya, co-senior author Bratislav Misic and their colleagues wanted to understand whether similar changes in behavioral responsiveness across species under anesthesia are also associated with similar neural activity patterns.

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