BackgroundThe anesthetic states are accompanied by functional alterations. However, the dose-related adaptive alterations in the higher-order network under anesthesia, e. g. default mode network (DMN), are poorly revealed.MethodsWe implanted electrodes in brain regions of the rat DMN to acquire local field potentials to investigate the perturbations produced by anesthesia. Relative power spectral density, static functional connectivity (FC), fuzzy entropy of dynamic FC, and topological features were computed from the data.ResultsThe results showed that adaptive reconstruction was induced by isoflurane, exhibiting reduced static and stable long-range FC, and altered topological features. These reconstruction patterns were in a dose-related fashion.ConclusionThese results might impart insights into the neural network mechanisms underlying anesthesia and suggest the potential of monitoring the depth of anesthesia based on the parameters of DMN.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12871-023-02153-6.