| Summary: | Burst suppression in the electroencephalogram (EEG) is a well described phenomenon that occurs during deep anaesthesia, as well as in a variety of congenital and acquired brain insults. Classically it is thought of as spatially synchronous, quasi-periodic bursts of high amplitude EEG separated by low amplitude activity. However, its characterisation as a ``global brain state'' has been challenged by recent results obtained with intracranial electrocortigraphy. Not only does it appear that burst suppression activity is highly asynchronous across cortex, but also that it may occur in isolated regions of circumscribed spatial extent. Here we outline a realistic neural field model for burst suppression by adding a slow process of synaptic resource depletion and recovery, which is able to reproduce qualitatively the empirically observed features during general anaesthesia at the whole cortex level. Simulations reveal heterogeneous bursting over the model cortex and complex spatiotemporal dynamics during simulated anaesthetic action, and provide forward predictions of neuroimaging signals for subsequent empirical comparisons and more detailed characterisation.Because burst suppression corresponds to a dynamical end-point of brain activity, theoretically accounting for its spatiotemporal emergence will vitally contribute to efforts aimed at clarifying whether a common physiological trajectory is induced by the actions of general anaesthetic agents. We have taken a first step in this direction by showing that a neural field model can qualitatively match recent experimental data that indicate spatial differentiation of burst suppression activity across cortex.
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