Director's Seminar Series - Professor Bruno van Swinderen, The University of Queensland

Synapse-specific trapping and whole-brain fragmentation: the complex road to general anaesthesia

 

Host: Professor Ehsan Arabzadeh

 

Abstract

General anaesthesia changed the course of medicine as it allowed surgeries to be performed on unconscious patients, via a wide variety of lipophilic drugs. How our consciousness can be so uniformly switched off with such a diverse range of molecules remains a mystery. Fully understanding a complex phenomenon such as general anaesthesia requires linking different levels of research: from local molecular effects at the synapse to brain-wide consequences in behaving animals. I’ll be discussing new approaches in single molecule tracking and whole brain imaging in Drosophila melanogaster, which are helping us understand how general anaesthetics might work to render animals inert and unresponsive. I will also discuss how uncovering mechanisms of general anaesthesia in different animals might inform our understanding of the evolution of subjective awareness and consciousness.

Biography

Bruno van Swinderen received a PhD in evolutionary biology from Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. His postdoctoral work at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California, led him to the scientific study of consciousness. Taking an evolutionary view, he developed novel paradigms to study perception in the smallest animal brains. His discoveries include uncovering neural correlates of sleep and selective attention in flies, as well as fundamental mechanisms of general anaesthesia. He has been running a cognitive neuroscience lab at the Queensland Brain Institute, in The University of Queensland, since 2008. His lab uses invertebrate models such as flies and worms to understand how the brain is able to block or prioritise sensory stimuli, as happens during sleep and attention. He is particularly interested in how sleep and attention might have co-evolved to optimise adaptive behaviour and is keen to promote research in simpler animal models to understand complex brain processes.