Have you ever watched the American movie “Awake,” which talks about awakening during surgery?

Although general anesthesia has potential risks, it is still not well known  how it leads the human brain to unconsciousness. Recently, a POSTECH joint research team has tried to explain scientifically the essence and control of consciousness through anesthesia and gained the attention from academic circles.

The joint research team, composed of Professor Seunghwan Kim, graduate student Hwang Eun-jin of Department of Physics, Professor Noh Gyu Jeong of Seoul Asan Hospital, and researcher Lee Woon-Chyul of Michigan University Medical School, presented proof that the transition to unconsciousness occurs by the suppression of the information flow channel in the brain through experimentation with general anesthesia. The result of the research was introduced as a target paper in Consciousness and Cognition, the journal of the highest authority in the field.

The joint research team derived general anesthesia from injecting propofol into normal people and measured the amount and the direction of information flow both in the frontal lobe, which takes charge of recognition, and in the occipital lobe, which processes sensory information. As a result, the information flow from the frontal lobe toward the occipital lobe decreases at the same time when it becomes unconscious but the flow in the opposite direction keeps uniform at all times.

This means that the information processing which deals with senses from the outside before being unconsciousness is performed constantly in a patient’s brain under the general anesthesia state, but the information processing after being unconsciousness is strongly suppressed. Also, this result is expected to be applied to a new index development to prevent accidents such as awakening during surgery. POSTECH professor Seunghwan Kim said, “Through the joint research, we found the clue to solve the main puzzle, such as the steps in losing the consciousness which have been controversial among scientists”.

They also found that people have their own distinctive brain activated pattern in the conscious and unconscious states. This provides scientific proof that people feel differently watching the same movie and experience the same situations differently.

The world distinguished anesthetist Anthony Hudetz in the University of Wisconsin remarked in the commentary about the research by the POSTECH joint team that it opens a new prospect to understand the consciousness and anesthesia neurologically.

This result is expected to help define the existence and role of the peculiar information flow system both in the unconscious state and in a variety of conscious states, such as brain death, vegetative states, and epilepsy.