ArticlePloS one2010
A conserved behavioral state barrier impedes transitions between anesthetic-induced unconsciousness and wakefulness: evidence for neural inertia.
Article in PloS one, 2010. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 114 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
114 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 211 citations in OpenAlex.
- Ferret as a model system for studying the anatomy and function of the prefrontal cortex: A systematic review.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2024Pooled it
- Anesthetic action on the transmission delay between cortex and thalamus explains the beta-buzz observed under propofol anesthesia.PloS one · 2017Trial
- Cellular and Microcircuit Mechanisms of Anesthetic Disruption of Conscious-State Organization.Cells · 2026Review
- Early reactivation of medial temporal lobe neurons during emergence from propofol anesthesia in neurosurgical patients.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Selective observation following betrayal shapes the social inference landscape.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- An open fMRI resource for studying human brain function and covert consciousness under anesthesia.Scientific data · 2026Article
- Modulatory mechanism of the paraventricular thalamus (PVT) under general anesthesia.Frontiers in pharmacology · 2026Review
- Noradrenergic tuning of arousal is coupled to movement transitions.Cell reports · 2025Article
- Reanimation of rodents: an animal model for cognitive recovery from anaesthesia.British journal of anaesthesia · 2025Article
- A probabilistic model of behavioural emergence from general anaesthesia in mice.British journal of anaesthesia · 2025Article
- Emergence from general anaesthesia: stochastic or deterministic?British journal of anaesthesia · 2025Article
- Parafacial GABAergic neurone ablation induces behavioural resistance to volatile anaesthetic-induced hypnosis without reducing sleep.British journal of anaesthesia · 2025Article
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- Measuring the dynamic balance of integration and segregation underlying consciousness, anesthesia, and sleep in humans.Nature communications · 2024Article
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- Anesthesia and the neurobiology of consciousness.Neuron · 2024Review
- Measuring the dynamic balance of integration and segregation underlying consciousness, anesthesia, and sleep.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Time to Wake Up! The Ongoing Search for General Anesthetic Reversal Agents.Anesthesiology · 2024Article
- Linear thinking does not reflect the newer 21st-century anesthesia concepts. A narrative review.Journal of clinical monitoring and computing · 2023Review
54 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
11 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
One major unanswered question in neuroscience is how the brain transitions between conscious and unconscious states. General anesthetics offer a controllable means to study these transitions. Induction of anesthesia is commonly attributed to drug-induced global modulation of neuronal function, while emergence from anesthesia has been thought to occur passively, paralleling elimination of the anesthetic from its sites in the central nervous system (CNS). If this were true, then CNS anesthetic concentrations on induction and emergence would be indistinguishable. By generating anesthetic dose-response data in both insects and mammals, we demonstrate that the forward and reverse paths through which anesthetic-induced unconsciousness arises and dissipates are not identical. Instead they exhibit hysteresis that is not fully explained by pharmacokinetics as previously thought. Single gene mutations that affect sleep-wake states are shown to collapse or widen anesthetic hysteresis without obvious confounding effects on volatile anesthetic uptake, distribution, or metabolism. We propose a fundamental and biologically conserved concept of neural inertia, a tendency of the CNS to resist behavioral state transitions between conscious and unconscious states. We demonstrate that such a barrier separates wakeful and anesthetized states for multiple anesthetics in both flies and mice, and argue that it contributes to the hysteresis observed when the brain transitions between conscious and unconscious states.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.