Anesthetic state does not affect the map of the hand representation within area 3b somatosensory cortex in owl monkey.

Receptive fields defined for small clusters of neurons within the middle cortical layers of area 3b differed little in size or in the skin locations represented among: alert, nitrous oxide-anesthetized, deep sodium pentobarbital-anesthetized, and ketamine-anesthetized owl monkeys. Repeated recordings from nearly identical cortical loci yielded nearly identical multi-unit receptive fields under different conditions of anesthesia.