When anesthesiologists are keeping track of how unconscious you are, they monitor indicators such as blood pressure, heart rate, and movement, even though what anesthesia drugs act upon is the nervous system.

As an anesthesiologist, neuroscientist and statistician, Emery Brown has sought to bring anesthesiology and neuroscience together to improve clinical practice and outcomes. For several years he has studied the precise neural circuit mechanisms of action of the commonly used anesthetic drugs and has rigorously documented hallmark EEG signatures that the anesthetized brain exhibits (including how they change with different drugs and with age).

From all that work, his lab has developed algorithms that allow anesthesiologists to monitor EEGs in the operating room to have a much more direct and principled sense of how well anesthetized patients are. He has shown, for instance, that to keep many patients properly anesthetized requires much lower doses than conventional wisdom suggests. When anesthesiologists administer lower doses, patients recover more quickly, lucidly and comfortably.

For example, Brown was a key collaborator on a clinical trial involving more than 170 young children in Japan. In the study, published in 2025 in JAMA Pediatrics, use of EEG monitoring vs. standard care resulted in significant improvements in several post-operative outcomes, including quicker post-operative recovery and reduced incidence of delirium.

Brown has also applied these insights to the development of closed-loop anesthesia delivery systems, which can automatically assess consciousness level and assist anesthesiologists by finely adjusting drug dose to maintain a desired consciousness level. In a 2023 study in PNAS Nexus, the research team reported that a prototype system enabled more than 18 hours of fine-grained consciousness control over the course of nine anesthesia sessions with two animal subjects.