The Math Of Brewing Coffee Can Model Anesthesia

Mathematics that can describe coffeepots, forest fires and flu outbreaks may also underpin the brain's response to anesthesia, a new study suggests.The mathematical model of the brain, published in Physical Review Letters, marks the latest attempt to simulate the surprisingly complicated effects of general anesthetics across the brain. Despite modern medicine's 160-year use of ether, laughing gas and propofol in surgery, researchers still don't know how exactly they tamp down the back-and-forth ...