Jad Abumrad

So lots of chit-chat amongst the different parts of my brain make me conscious and not so much chit-chat equals unconsciousness.

Yeah, that's the idea.

And how do the slow waves relate to that?

Well, Patrick thinks of it sort of in baseball terms.

Right.

And the thing is that when the wave is going on in the stadium, you can't really carry on a normal conversation.

You can't have a normal interaction.

You may not even be able to have a normal thought because the thing is just coming by every couple seconds to interrupt you.

That is sort of the rationale for how these oscillations disrupt brain activity.

I dig the analogy, but I'm not quite following.

It helps to zoom in on the brain and look at a smaller number of neurons, which is what he did.

Now check this out.

We conducted this study where we measured brain activity in individual neurons.

They got some patients, planted these tiny little electrodes deep into their brains so they could hear the individual neurons.

So let's imagine that we zoom in to like tens to hundreds of neurons firing.

And he says when they give that patient propofol, an anesthetic, what we notice is that right at the point of loss of consciousness, sure enough, they see those big slow waves sweeping through.

And just like in Fenway, when the wave hits you, you have to stop your conversation.

But what that wave is really doing is it's only allowing each little cluster of neurons to talk once in a while.

They can only fire once.

at a particular moment in this slow oscillation.