Anesthetics, drugs that reduce sensation or, in the case of general anesthetics, awareness, help doctors minimize the pain and discomfort experienced by patients during surgeries or other procedures. Many anesthetics produce similar behavioral changes in different species, suggesting that they affect their brains similarly.

Researchers at the University of Oxford, McGill University, the NeuroSpin Center and other institutions worldwide recently tried to further explore this possibility by examining the signals produced by nerve cells (i.e., neural activity) across six different species under anesthesia.

Their findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, suggest that anesthesia produces a shared pattern of neural activity, with shorter-lasting local fluctuations and reduced coordination between different regions of the nervous system across all six species.