How does anesthesia work to make people unconscious? What’s the exact mechanism of it? It seems really fascinating so I’d like to hear your thoughts and knowledge on this.
In: Biology
Anesthesia makes people unconscious by interfering with how nerves in the brain and spinal cord communicate. It increases the action of certain chemicals that calm brain activity and blocks other signals that would normally keep you awake. This combination then slows down brain activity enough to make you unaware and unresponsive during surgery or whatever needs to be done.
The truth is that how exactly anesthesia works is not well understood.
Every few years you get another excited paper by a person or team who thinks they have cracked this issue, but so far there doesn’t appear to be a generally accepted solution to the question.
If someone tells you that they have solved it and know exactly how anesthesia works and that they can prove it, ask them to see the Nobel Prize they got for figuring that out.
It’s basically a chemical that numbs the nervous system so the brain can’t send signals to other parts of the body. The end effect is basically forcing the brain into a repeating pattern of “sleep”
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