What Does Anesthesia Do to Your Brain?

to alarm anyone but we don't really know exactly how general anesthesia works we do know is that it works in there is relatively safe but scientists are still trying to figure out how these different chemicals which job the lights in your  brain is a state where you're insensitive to pain and doctors use it so that when they need to get your heart to your kidneys or whenever they can turn something invasive and traumatic into a peaceful nap general anesthesia is the kind that knocks you out completely as opposed to local anesthesia which just number part of your body for a while or Twilight situation where you're technically conscious but won't remember anything that happened usually general anesthesia involves a combination of two drugs the first knocks you out fast and the other one keeps you that way anesthesiologist confined to the dosage of the second drug to make sure you don't wake up too early or go too far under so we know that I'm aesthetics knock you unconscious and we know that they keep you from feeling pain responding to your environment and almost always from remembering what happened which is a huge plus because ceiling and remembering being sliced up and stitched back together would not be pleasant anesthesia is not the same thing is going to sleep some parts of the brain are still active but unlike when you're fully conscious those active parts don't really communicate with each other grain patterns of someone under anesthesia don't look like sleep either there's no rapid eye movement or dreaming under anesthesia and if these are brain waves actually look a lot like the brain waves of a coma patient which makes sense because anesthesia is a lot like a coma is just reversible under a doctor's control weird thing is this same anesthetic state can be brought on by a whole bunch of completely different chemicals from the noble gas xenon the big molecules made up of rings of carbon and all these different anesthetics do similar things scientists think they must have something in common the most obvious one is that they almost all dissolved in oils oils like the inside of your cell membranes decades researchers thought that anesthetics could dissolve in the membranes of your brain cells and disrupt them somehow its own compounds that are very similar to anesthetics and very oil soluble don't numb pain and some anesthetics are very oil soluble it all these days scientists think it has more to do with proteins which have oily patches as well that's probably Banda proteins in your brain but it's hard to study drugs that bond in an orderly environment and aesthetics Banda very weakly to the proteins they act on it it's hard to get them to stick in place for long enough to know exactly where they're stuck the best understood anesthetic is also one of them most popular propofol propofol binds to the receptor for a chemical messenger called GABA which is involved in controlling sleep alertness and some other things above all helps activate the brains receptors for GABA and researchers think it's especially active in the part of the brain that handle sleep but we don't know exactly how that part of the brain controls consciousness and how propofol switch is it off and then back on again as soon as it goes away but some studies have found that there's also a bunch of other anesthetics that also by the GABA receptor researchers think that they're on the right track and there's one really strange thing that we do know redheads need more anesthetic doctors have been reporting cases of this for a while and at least one small study showed that redheads need nineteen percent more anesthetic than people with dark hair according to authors of the study the gene that produces red hair color seems to be related to resistance to anesthetic especially since it's also been linked to pain sensitivity so we don't really know how general anesthesia works but it's a good thing that it does and as we study it we're gonna be learning more about how the brain is put together and maybe a little more about gingers