Luppi Andrea I, Golkowski Daniel, Ranft Andreas, Ilg Rudiger, Jordan Denis, Bzdok Danilo, Owen Adrian M, Naci Lorina, Stamatakis Emmanuel A, Amico Enrico, Misic Bratislav
Montréal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada.
Division of Anaesthesia and Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
Nat Hum Behav. 2025 Mar 24. doi: 10.1038/s41562-025-02121-9.
The human brain is characterized by idiosyncratic patterns of spontaneous thought, rendering each brain uniquely identifiable from its neural activity. However, deep general anaesthesia suppresses subjective experience. Does it also suppress what makes each brain unique? Here we used functional MRI scans acquired under the effects of the general anaesthetics sevoflurane and propofol to determine whether anaesthetic-induced unconsciousness diminishes the uniqueness of the human brain, both with respect to the brains of other individuals and the brains of another species. Using functional connectivity, we report that under anaesthesia individual brains become less self-similar and less distinguishable from each other. Loss of distinctiveness is highly organized: it co-localizes with the archetypal sensory-association axis, correlating with genetic and morphometric markers of phylogenetic differences between humans and other primates. This effect is more evident at greater anaesthetic depths, reproducible across sevoflurane and propofol and reversed upon recovery. Providing convergent evidence, we show that anaesthesia shifts the functional connectivity of the human brain closer to the functional connectivity of the macaque brain in a low-dimensional space. Finally, anaesthesia diminishes the match between spontaneous brain activity and cognitive brain patterns aggregated from the Neurosynth meta-analytic engine. Collectively, the present results reveal that anaesthetized human brains are not only less distinguishable from each other, but also less distinguishable from the brains of other primates, with specifically human-expanded regions being the most affected by anaesthesia.
人类大脑具有独特的自发思维模式，使得每个大脑都能通过其神经活动被唯一识别。然而，深度全身麻醉会抑制主观体验。它是否也会抑制使每个大脑独一无二的东西呢？在这里，我们使用在七氟醚和丙泊酚这两种全身麻醉药作用下获得的功能磁共振成像扫描，来确定麻醉诱导的无意识状态是否会削弱人类大脑相对于其他个体大脑以及其他物种大脑的独特性。通过功能连接性分析，我们发现，在麻醉状态下，个体大脑之间的自相似性降低，彼此之间的可区分性也降低。独特性的丧失具有高度的组织性：它与典型的感觉关联轴共定位，与人类和其他灵长类动物之间系统发育差异的遗传和形态测量标记相关。这种效应在麻醉深度加深时更为明显，在七氟醚和丙泊酚之间均可重现，且在恢复时会逆转。作为趋同证据，我们表明，在低维空间中，麻醉会使人类大脑的功能连接性更接近猕猴大脑的功能连接性。最后，麻醉会减少自发脑活动与从神经合成元分析引擎汇总的认知脑模式之间的匹配度。总体而言，目前的结果表明，麻醉状态下的人类大脑不仅彼此之间难以区分，而且与其他灵长类动物的大脑也难以区分，其中人类特有的扩展区域受麻醉影响最大。
