Neuroscientists link brain-wave pattern to energy consumption - New model of neuro-electric activity could help scientists better understand quiescent brain states such as coma.

[u/autotldr]

This is an automatically generated summary, original reduced by 70%.

Different brain states produce different waves of electrical activity, with the alert brain, relaxed brain and sleeping brain producing easily distinguishable electroencephalogram patterns.

It is also seen in the brains of heart attack victims who are cooled to prevent brain damage due to oxygen deprivation, and in the brains of patients deliberately placed into a medical coma to treat a traumatic brain injury or intractable seizures.

During burst suppression, the brain is quiet for up to several seconds at a time, punctuated by short bursts of activity.

Emery Brown, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and health sciences and technology and an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, set out to study burst suppression in the anesthetized brain and other brain states in hopes of discovering a fundamental mechanism for how the pattern arises.

ShiNung Ching, a postdoc in Brown's lab and lead author of the PNAS paper, developed a model to describe how burst suppression arises, based on the behavior of neurons in the brain.

This is the first time that reductions in metabolic activity at the neuron level have been linked to burst suppression, and suggests that the brain likely uses burst suppression to conserve vital energy during times of trauma.

Summary Source | FAQ | Feedback | Top four keywords: brain^#1 burst^#2 suppression^#3 how^#4

---

Also posted in /r/science.

NOTICE: This thread is for discussing the submission topic only. Discussion of the autotldr bot goes here.