Mysterious burst of activity in flatliners

• Autores: Andy Coghlan
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 2936, 2013, pág. 14
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Pats of the brain may still be alive even when someone is in a deep coma and their brain activity seems to have gone silent. When a person enters a deep coma an electroencephalogram (EEG) may eventually show a flatline, which is one of the signs of brain death. However, while monitoring a patient who had been placed in a coma to prevent seizures following a cardiac arrest, Bogdan Florea at the Regina Maria Medical Centre in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, noticed something strange--tiny intermittent bursts of activity interrupting a flatline signal, each burst lasting a few seconds. He asked Florin Amzica of the University of Montreal in Canada and his colleagues to investigate what might be happening. In an attempt to create a similar scenario, Amzica's team put cats into a deep coma using a high dose of anesthetic. While EEG recordings taken at the surface of the brain--the cortex-- showed a flatline, those from deep-brain electrodes revealed tiny bursts of activity. Those mysterious signals originated in the hippocampus, which is responsible for memory and learning, and spread within minutes to the cortex.