ICube-MSII webinar: A/D Drugs- How to convert analog to digital drugs

Axel HUTT, senior researcher in the ICube laboratory, will give a talk, Thursday, November 26th, 2020 at 1:30pm in the amphitheater A301 of the Pole API building in Illkirch.

Title: A/D Drugs- How to convert analog to digital drugs

Abstract: The similarity between the neural action of chemical drugs and external stimulation had been found experimentally already in the year 1949 by Moruzzi and Magoun. Today the notion of a digital drug has been around for about 10 years. It represents either auditory beat sequences or visual scene sequences. Both stimulation types induce trance-like states as known from analog, i.e. chemical or biological, drugs. From a clinical research point of view, external visual scene flicker stimulations have been known for decades to induce visual hallucinations without the administration of chemical or biological drugs. Moreover, electric stimulation has been known for decades to induce sleep-like states. Today, more and more patients worldwide are treated by external electromagnetic stimulation, such as Transcranial Electric Stimulation (TES) or Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS). These stimulations have been shown to complement or even replace conventional drug treatment. The talk presents a recent model that allows to describe electroencephalographic data (EEG) obtained during clinical general anaesthesia under administration of aesthetic drugs. To investigate how external stimulation could replace the analog drug action in general anaesthesia, recent theoretical results on external stimulation effects are shown. They demonstrate how TES/TMS may affect neural EEG.

References:
G. Moruzzi and H. Magoun. Brainstem reticular formation and activiation of the EEG. Electroencephalogr. Clin. Neurophysiol., 1 :455–473, 1949.
A. Hutt, J. Lefebvre, D. Hight, and J. Sleigh. Suppression of underlying neuronal fluctuations mediates EEG slowing during general anaesthesia. Neuroimage, 179 :414–428, 2018.
J. Lefebvre, A. Hutt, and F. Frohlich. Stochastic resonance mediates the state-dependent effect of periodic stimulation on cortical alpha oscillations. eLife, 6 :e32054, 2017.