2. General anaesthesia reduces the uniqueness of brain connectivity across individuals and species

COEX 

The human brain is characterised by idiosyncratic patterns of spontaneous thought, rendering each brain uniquely identifiable from its neural activity (Amico and Goñi, 2018; Finn et al., 2015). However, deep general anaesthesia suppresses subjective experience. Does it also suppress what makes each brain unique? We attack this question from three conceptual angles. First, we compare brain connectivity within and across individuals. Second, we compare brain activity against the canonical brain maps of human cognition. Third, we ask whether anaesthesia makes the human brain less distinctive from another species: the macaque.