Auditory deviance detection and attention allocation in surgically treated brain aneurysm patients

Anxiety, stress and depressive mood are frequent mental symptoms in humans before surgery. These factors and surgery itself can affect cognitive functions. In this study we used brain evoked potentials to study neurophysiological responses to auditory cues: how do brain neural networks respond to deviant sound or to emotionally loaded sounds (happy, neutral, angry). In individual patients brain responses to emotional sounds were larger postoperatively suggesting that emotional sensitivity had changed. We are now gathering a group of health controls to further study the meaning of this finding.