{"id":237057,"date":"2026-05-13T10:07:14","date_gmt":"2026-05-13T15:07:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/its-not-just-deep-sleep-anesthesia-drives-brain-into-a-strange-state-doctors-are-only-beginning-to-map"},"modified":"2026-05-13T10:07:14","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T15:07:14","slug":"its-not-just-deep-sleep-anesthesia-drives-brain-into-a-strange-state-doctors-are-only-beginning-to-map","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/its-not-just-deep-sleep-anesthesia-drives-brain-into-a-strange-state-doctors-are-only-beginning-to-map","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s not just deep sleep: Anesthesia drives brain into a strange state doctors are only beginning to map"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/its-not-just-deep-sleep-anesthesia-drives-brain-into-a-strange-state-doctors-are-only-beginning-to-map.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>People often describe anesthesia as something that puts a patient in a \u201cdeep sleep.\u201d An anesthesiologist enters the operating room, and part of their mission is to ensure that the patient is completely unaware of what is happening around them until they wake up, often several hours later. Scientists and doctors have long debated what happens to the brain under anesthetic drugs during a surgical procedure.<\/p>\n<p>A new study by Yale School of Medicine\u2019s Departments of Anesthesiology and Neurology <a href=\"https:\/\/pnas.org\/doi\/10.1073\/pnas.2514098123\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> on May 11, 2026, in <i>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/i> uncovers new insights which may change the way we describe being under anesthesia. The study, \u201cSpectral mapping reveals a resemblance of the anesthetic brain state to both sleep and coma,\u201d reveals that being anesthetized may be more than simply being \u201cput to sleep.\u201d It can potentially carry more similarities to being in a coma than we originally thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>People often describe anesthesia as something that puts a patient in a \u201cdeep sleep.\u201d An anesthesiologist enters the operating room, and part of their mission is to ensure that the patient is completely unaware of what is happening around them until they wake up, often several hours later. Scientists and doctors have long debated what [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-237057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237057\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}