Anesthesia and neuroimaging: investigating the neural correlates of unconsciousness

•Anesthetic sedation and neuroimaging are often combined to study the neural substrates of consciousness. •With increasing sedation, complex cognitive processes are impaired before more-basic processes at sensory processes. •Sedation disrupts processing between cortical networks, and in association cortices before sensory cortices. •These studies are essential for interpreting brain activity in patients with disorders of consciousness. In the...