power to the people - Swinburne University of Technology

anaesthetics
Since modern anaesthesia was first
employed 171 years ago to lessen
the pain of surgery, the true nature
of human consciousness and
unconsciousness has remained a
scientific mystery. Now, armed with
one of the world’s most advanced
diagnostic instruments and the rarest naturally
occurring gas, a team of Australian scientists are
proposing to reveal the way our brain activity is
transformed when we descend into unconsciousness.
Impelled by media horror stories of patients ‘awake
under the knife’ and by resulting insurance claims and
psychological trauma, a 30-year global research effort
has so far failed to disclose exactly how anaesthetic
drugs act upon the brain, the mind and the state of
consciousness – despite the millions of operations
performed with them around the world every day.
Defining the nature of consciousness
For Swinburne’s Professor David Liley, the nature
of consciousness has been a lifetime fascination,
marked by an important milestone in 2012 when his
Brain Anaesthesia Response (BAR) device entered
clinical trials as a potential replacement for existing
electroencephalogram techniques used the world
over to monitor patients under anaesthetic. Now,
in a world-first experiment in partnership with
Melbourne’s St Vincent’s Hospital, Professor Liley and
a talented team of intrepid ‘brain geographers’ are
combining the power of magnetoencephalography
(MEG) – reading minute electromagnetic signals
within the brain – with the use of a rare and costly
anaesthetic, the noble gas xenon, to try to define the
process that takes place when a person passes from
one state of consciousness to another.
“Despite all the monitoring of brain function that
has gone on over the years, consciousness remains
a black box,” he explains. “We have huge amounts
of data about brain states, but little or no insight into
the thing we are really trying to monitor: whether a
person is conscious or unconscious. Whether they
are aware of what is happening around them, or can
feel pain.”
New technology and the
volunteer study
Equipped with one of only two MEG machines in
Australia, Professor Liley and his colleagues at
Swinburne’s Brain and Psychological Sciences
Research Centre are studying electromagnetic
signals many millions of times weaker than the
earth’s magnetic field. This is a task of such
exquisite delicacy it must be carried out in a
specially shielded chamber that excludes all
New research is using
cutting-edge technology and
the rare gas xenon to
explore the effects of anaesthesia.
CONSCIOUS
decisions
by julian cribb
8 | swinburne | venture | issue ONE 2013