The Puzzle of Anaesthesia: Not an Off Switch

Send us Fan Mail Every day, thousands of people lie down, count backward from ten, and vanish for hours. We’ve done this for 180 years without knowing how it works. 🧠 A new study in Nature Neuroscience compared humans, macaques, marmosets, mice, zebrafish and a 302-neuron worm. Across 700 million years of evolution, they found 485 shared mathematical signatures of unconsciousness. ✨ The “echo” of a thought collapses. ✨ Brain regions lose their rhythm. ✨ Five volts to one thalamic hub woke ane...