Stony Brook University Mind/Brain Lecture 2023 with Emery Brown

Dr. Emery Brown is the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anaesthesia, Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital.

His lecture, "Deciphering the Dynamics of the Unconscious Brain Under General Anesthesia," was held April 10, 2023. Dr. Brown describes how anesthetic drugs create this amazing state of general anesthesia. The brain is not turned off but is rather quite active in a highly structured way under general anesthesia. The lecture focuses on how the anesthetic drugs create unconsciousness, how an anesthesiologist can be sure that a patient is unconscious under anesthesia, the difference between anesthesia and sleep, and how we can “turn the brain back on” after anesthesia.

Dr. Brown is an anesthesiologist-statistician whose research studies the neurophysiology of anesthesia and development of signal processing algorithms for neuroscience data analysis. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Inventors. He is the recipient of the Swartz Prize in Computational Neuroscience, the Dickson Prize in Science, and the Gruber Prize in Neuroscience.