Abstract
The dynamical mechanism underlying the processes of anesthesia-induced loss of consciousness and recovery is key to gaining insights into the working of the nervous system. Previous experiments revealed an asymmetry between neural signals during the anesthesia and recovery processes. Here we obtain experimental evidence for the hysteresis loop and articulate the dynamical mechanism based on percolation on multilayer complex networks with self-similarity. Model analysis reveals that, during anesthesia, the network is able to maintain its neural pathways despite the loss of a substantial fraction of the edges. A predictive and potentially testable result is that, in the forward process of anesthesia, the average shortest path and the clustering coefficient of the neural network are markedly smaller than those associated with the recovery process. This suggests that the network strives to maintain certain neurological functions by adapting to a relatively more compact structure in response to anesthesia.
Highlights
The origin of consciousness is an unsolved mystery in nature [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Motivated by the fact that state dependence is common in complex dynamical systems [27,28,29] and by the existent theoretical framework of modeling general anesthesia as a first-order phase transition in the cortex [24] in which the hysteresis is associated with state dependence, we develop a complex-network based dynamical mechanism to probe into the origin of the hysteresis phenomenon
Microelectrodes of impedance 0.5 M were implanted on the right medial prefrontal cortex (1.7 mm anterior to bregma, 0.4 mm lateral to the midline, and 1.5 mm below the brain surface), which were used for localfield potential (LFP) recordings
Summary
The origin of consciousness is an unsolved mystery in nature [1,2,3,4,5,6]. To understand the neural physics of consciousness remains a challenging problem, requiring interdisciplinary efforts among researchers from disciplines such as neuroscience, physics, nonlinear dynamics, and complex systems. Anesthesia-induced loss of consciousness and the possible recovery open a door to probing into the neural, physical, and dynamical mechanisms of consciousness [7,8,9,10]. Previous experimental studies provided evidence for the existence of a hysteresis phenomenon underlying the dynamics of loss and recovery of consciousness induced by anesthesia [11,12,13,14].
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