Intracortical microstimulation in rat visual cortex reveals that anesthesia dramatically reduces the density and complexity of effective connectivity among neurons compared to wakefulness. Stimulation caused an early increase in spiking followed by a prolonged decrease. Excitatory neurons' early responses decayed rapidly with distance under all conditions. Network motifs, especially higher-order ones, increased substantially as anesthesia was withdrawn, indicating a large increase in network connectivity as animals woke up. The findings illuminate how anesthesia impacts the functional integrity of local cortical circuits, affecting the state of consciousness.
The material view and reductionism, which treat the external world as objective and ignore internal consciousness, have led to dilemmas in biology and physics that reveal an inseparable interaction between matter and consciousness rather than absolute opposition. Consciousness is believed to influence wave function collapse, but a scientific model is lacking. This paper proposes a holistic cognitive paradigm based on perception rather than physical characteristics, summarizing existence into two abstract contradictory perceptual states (Yin-Yang). Matter and consciousness are seen as different states of perception, unified rather than opposed. This offers a falsifiable alternative to the material view, where events are inseparable from the observer's conscious perception.