A neuron model with unbalanced synaptic weights explains asymmetric effects of ketamine in auditory cortex
bioRxiv Preprint Server June 12, 2022 Luciana López-Jury, Francisco García-Rosales, Eugenia González-Palomares et al. preprint
Ketamine anesthesia does not uniformly suppress auditory cortex responses to all sounds. In bats, multifunctional neurons that process both echolocation and communication sounds are affected asymmetrically: under anesthesia, communication contexts cause global suppression of responses to lagging sounds, while echolocation contexts do not. This asymmetry depends on the frequency composition of sounds, not their temporal patterns. A computational model shows that anesthesia modulates spiking activity in a channel-specific way, decreasing responses to high-frequency sounds and increasing adaptation in corresponding cortical synapses. These findings indicate that ketamine anesthesia unbalances cortical inputs, altering how neurons respond to natural vocalizations in ways not predictable from known anesthetic effects.