Using Anesthesia to Reveal the Elements of Consciousness
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Updated: Feb 6, 2026

SECONDs Administration Guidelines: A Fast Tool to Assess Consciousness in Brain-injured Patients
Published on: February 6, 2021
1Department of Anaesthesia, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA.
Abstract:
General anesthesia provides an invaluable experimental tool to probe the essential neural circuits that underlie consciousness. A new study reports that cholinergic stimulation of the prefrontal cortex restores wake-like behaviors in anesthetized rodents, suggesting that cholinergic inputs to the prefrontal cortex play a fundamental role in modulating consciousness.
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