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General anesthesia is a standard medical procedure in today's hospital practice. Although in most cases the administration of anesthetics does not affect severely the patients health, side effects of anesthesia are well-known, such as nausea or cognitive impairment. Moreover 1-2 out of 1000 patients under surgery report a partial wake up from anesthesia during the operation. The reason for such a partial lack of control of depth of anesthesia is that medical procedures are highly optimized based on experience but the neural dynamics during general anesthesia is far from being understood. One reason for this lack of understanding is both the complex neural interactions of neurons on different...
Sleep and anesthesia resemble in many ways at a first glance. The most prominent common feature of course is the loss of consciousness, i.e. the loss of awareness of external stimuli. However a closer look at the loss of consciousness reveals already a difference between sleep and anesthesia: anesthesia is induced by an anesthetic drug whereas we may fall asleep without external cause. Other questions may arise about the difference of the two effects: do we dream during surgery under anesthesia, do we feel pain during sleep? Essentially, we may ask: what is common and what are the differences between sleep and anesthesia? To answer these questions, we may take a look at the neural origin of ...
Foreword by Walter J. Freeman. The induction of unconsciousness using anesthetic agents demonstrates that the cerebral cortex can operate in two very different behavioral modes: alert and responsive vs. unaware and quiescent. But the states of wakefulness and sleep are not single-neuron properties---they emerge as bulk properties of cooperating populations of neurons, with the switchover between states being similar to the physical change of phase observed when water freezes or ice melts. Some brain-state transitions, such as sleep cycling, anesthetic induction, epileptic seizure, are obvious and detected readily with a few EEG electrodes; others, such as the emergence of gamma rhythms durin...
Sleep and anesthesia resemble in many ways at a first glance. The most prominent common feature of course is the loss of consciousness, i.e. the loss of awareness of external stimuli. However a closer look at the loss of consciousness reveals already a difference between sleep and anesthesia: anesthesia is induced by an anesthetic drug whereas we may fall asleep without external cause. Other questions may arise about the difference of the two effects: do we dream during surgery under anesthesia, do we feel pain during sleep? Essentially, we may ask: what is common and what are the differences between sleep and anesthesia? To answer these questions, we may take a look at the neural origin of ...
The understanding of complex systems is a key element to predict and control the system’s dynamics. To gain deeper insights into the underlying actions of complex systems today, more and more data of diverse types are analyzed that mirror the systems dynamics, whereas system models are still hard to derive. Data assimilation merges both data and model to an optimal description of complex systems’ dynamics. The present eBook brings together both recent theoretical work in data assimilation and control and demonstrates applications in diverse research fields.
Increasing interest in the study of coordinated activity of brain cell ensembles reflects the current conceptualization of brain information processing and cognition. It is thought that cognitive processes involve not only serial stages of sensory signal processing, but also massive parallel information processing circuitries, and therefore it is the coordinated activity of neuronal networks of brains that give rise to cognition and consciousness in general. While the concepts and techniques to measure synchronization are relatively well characterized and developed in the mathematics and physics community, the measurement of coordinated activity derived from brain signals is not a trivial ta...
One of the major contemporary challenges in both physical and social sciences is modeling, analyzing, and understanding the self-organization, evolution, behavior, and eventual decay of complex dynamical systems ranging from cell assemblies to the human brain to animal societies. The multi-faceted problems in this domain require a wide range of methods from various scienti?c disciplines. There is no question that the inclusion of time delays in complex system models considerably enriches the challenges presented by the problems. Although this inclusion often becomes inevitable as real-world applications demand more and more realistic m- els, the role of time delays in the context of complex ...