Convergent effects of different anesthetics are due to changes in phase alignment of cortical oscillations

Abstract

Many anesthetics cause loss of responsiveness despite having diverse underlying molecular and circuit actions. To explore the convergent effects of these drugs, we examined how anesthetic doses of ketamine and dexmedetomidine affected oscillations in the prefrontal cortex of nonhuman primates. Both anesthetics caused increases in phase locking in the ventrolateral and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, within and across hemispheres. However, the nature of the phase locking varied. Activity in different subregions within a hemisphere became more anti-phase with both drugs. Local analyses within a region suggested that this finding could be explained by broad cortical distance-based effects, such as large traveling waves. By contrast, homologous areas across hemispheres became more in-phase. Our results suggest that both anesthetics induce strong patterns of cortical phase alignment that are markedly different from those in the awake state, and that these patterns may be a common feature driving loss of responsiveness from different anesthetic drugs.