Comprehensive profiling of anaesthetised brain dynamics across phylogeny

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Computational Biology
• Comparative Biology

Background:

• Neuronal circuit dynamics are crucial for cognition.
• Anesthesia offers a model to study brain function suppression and recovery.
• Understanding the link between neurobiology and behavior requires studying neural dynamics.

Purpose of the Study:

• To identify conserved neural dynamics during anesthesia across diverse species.
• To investigate the relationship between local neural dynamics and global network connectivity.
• To explore the potential for reversing anesthetic effects through targeted brain stimulation.

Main Methods:

• Compiled multi-scale neural activity data from humans, macaques, marmosets, mice, and nematodes during wakefulness and anesthesia.
• Applied extensive feature extraction to >6,000 time-series features for dynamical characterization.
• Utilized a connectome-based computational model for in silico recapitulation of network dynamics.

Main Results:

• Identified a phylogenetically conserved dynamical profile of anesthesia, including reduced intrinsic timescales.
• Found an evolutionarily conserved spatial layout of this dynamical signature, linked to neurotransmission profiles.
• Observed reduced inter-regional synchrony during anesthesia, which was reversed by centromedian thalamus deep-brain stimulation in macaques.

Conclusions:

• Anesthesia induces a conserved spatiotemporal isolation of local neural activity across species.
• Local neural dynamics during anesthesia are linked to global network connectivity.
• Deep-brain stimulation can restore arousal and responsiveness, reversing the anesthetic dynamical regime.