In this video, Prof Paul Maruff, PhD, Chief Science Officer at Cogstate, updates us on an important new publication that provides a framework for understanding central nervous system changes that occur in the perioperative environment (i.e. disorders associated with factors related to a hospital admission for surgery, the conduct of surgery and anesthesia, discharge from the surgical environment and discharge from the hospital). The publication is titled Recommendations for the Nomenclature of Cognitive Change Associated with Anesthesia and Surgery 2018, and it reflects a lot of work that has been conducted by The Nomenclature Consensus Group, which has been assembled to review the evidence and seeks to understand and develop a common framework for discussing, defining and characterizing the changes that occur through the perioperative space. The importance of this nomenclature statement is that it reflects the opinions, expertise and experience of researchers and clinicians that come from a diverse set of areas of medicine; all of which have been directly or indirectly involved in seeking to manage or understand the way in which brains change as a result of anesthesia in surgery.