Comment by gavmor
3 hours ago
That’s somewhat overstated.
We know anesthesia "works," and we know some of its molecular targets, but we do not fully know the mechanism by which it produces unconsciousness, ie whether anesthesia eliminates experience, or mainly blocks memory, report, and integrated neural processing.
Anesthesia appears to be a fairly broad effect - anaesthetics work on plants, for example [1], even though they lack any neural tissue whatsoever. It would be extremely surprising if those effects were also targeted enough to halt only some types of brain activity.
[1]: e.g. https://doi.org/10.4161/psb.27886