Neuroscientist Emery Brown hopes to shed light on a longstanding medical mystery: how general anesthesia works.

Since 1846, when a Boston dentist named William Morton gave the first public demonstration of general anesthesia using ether, scientists and doctors have tried to figure out what happens to the brain during general anesthesia.

Though much has been learned since then, many aspects of general anesthesia remain a mystery. How do anesthetic drugs interfere with neurons and brain chemicals to produce the profound loss of consciousness and lack of pain typical of general anesthesia? And, how does general anesthesia differ from sleep or coma?

Emery Brown, an MIT neuroscientist and practicing anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, wants to answer those questions by bringing the rigorous approach of neuroscience to the study of general anesthesia. In a review article published online Dec. 29 in the New England Journal of Medicine, he and two colleagues lay out a new framework for studying general anesthesia by relating it to what is already known about sleep and coma.