Sometimes, curiosity reveals the strangest things. Recently, I have been learning to read simple EEGs. We occasionally use this monitor in anesthesia, especially with total intravenous anesthetics. Although the monitor analyzes EEG data and spits out a number, I've wanted to understand the raw wave forms. Some of the literature is wonderfully bizarre; the image above appears in a paper published in Anesthesia & Analgesia in 2006. It turns out dolphins sleep with one side of their brain at a time. While one hemisphere dozes off, the other hemisphere keeps the dolphin swimming (which causes it to circle rather than swim straight); that hemisphere takes a nap when the first wakes up. Bispectral analysis monitors can detect the differential hemispheric activity. Talk about a cool experiment!
Image shown under Fair Use.
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1 comment:
Hi Craig - I'm a regular reader of your blog. Can you post your thoughts to the much talked about cover piece in this week's Time magazine?
http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/20/bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/
Thanks.
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