General anesthesia is a medical miracle that enabled millions of patients to have life-saving surgeries without pain. However, despite the miraculous work of the drug, scientist are still unsure how ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: For decades, one of the best tools for probing the nature of human consciousness has been medicine’s most reliable method for switching it off: ...

The discovery of general anesthesia 170 years ago was a medical miracle, enabling millions of patients to undergo invasive, life-saving surgeries without pain. Yet despite decades of research, ...

Though it may be a surprise to the millions of people who undergo general anesthesia every year for medical procedures, the biological mechanism for how different anesthetics block consciousness is ...

Hailed as one of the most important medical advances, the discovery of general anesthetics - compounds which induce unconsciousness, prevent control of movement and block pain - helped transform ...

October 16 is World Anesthesia Day, celebrating the 170th anniversary of the first successful demonstration of surgical anesthesia. Prior to then, surgery was really unpleasant, to put it mildly -- ...

A growing body of neuroscience research is challenging the long-held assumption that general anesthesia works by simply switching the brain off. Instead, multiple independent studies now point to a ...

Researchers have found that general anesthesia induces unconsciousness by hijacking the neural circuitry that makes us fall sleep. They traced this neural circuitry back to a cluster of cells at the ...