As a compliment to the thread about near death experiences I’d really like hearing people’s experiences of losing consciousness under general anesthesia and what’s it like coming back.
Also interested of things anesthetists may have noticed about this during their career.
To me it felt like THE BEST dreamless nap.
Did you feel rested afterwards?
I did!
Life just stops. It’s like there was a portion deleted from your living record. No thoughts. No dreams. No fuzzy memories at the edge of thought that you can’t quite recall. None of that stuff you get even when blackout drunk. One moment you’re alive, counting or talking to the nurse, then suddenly you’re back and someone’s removed a piece of your body and apparently a piece of your timeline.
This is the correct answer. It’s a complete lack of experiencing anything. Not black, not darkness, but simply nothing. Before the general anesthesia you’ll feel high, and when you’re coming out of the general anesthesia you’ll be groggier than you’ve ever been in your life, but the time during general anesthesia simply won’t exist for you.
It’s the experience of death. Life is going on, time is passing, but your consciousness is not part of it.
I just talked about this on other thread but I find the non-experience of general anesthesia to be quite comforting in two ways.
Assuming that from the first person perspective it’s indistinguishable from death then it confirms that death is not just some kind of positive non-existence. You’re not left floating in a black void. It’s not that there’s a gap in the movie that’s just a blank screen. That entire section is removed. You go from one moment to another entirely skipping what happened inbetween. From first person perspective that gap doesn’t exist. You never really went unconsciouss. You went from experiencing the drugs starting to take effect to waking up. Death is probably just like this except that there’s no jump from experience to another but experience just stops.
The another thing about this is that maybe death doesn’t stop experience. Since you cannot experience not existing then maybe death is no different from general anesthesia; you die here and then in an instant you’re (what ever that is) transported having some other experience somewhere else in a different body or into whatever that can have experiences. Perhaps this is what people mean by rebirth.
I like this perspective, I think I will adopt it.
A slightly related thought. I personally find experience/perspective/consciousness itself to be of utmost absurdity. I don’t find indefinite consciousness via some method I don’t understand to be any more absurd.
“What is consciousness?” That is the one question I want to know the answer to the most. I’m sorry cancer patients but if I get to meet an oracle and get to ask one thing that’s what I’m going to ask.
I don’t even so much care about how it emerges or what are the requirements needed for it to emerge. That is the “easy” problem. What I’m truly curious about is what it is. How can it be that materia gives rise to subjective experience. It’s weird! It’s something so fundamental yet if you weren’t experiencing it yourself you’d have no idea it’s even a thing. There’s zero evidence for it outside of the mind itself.
Also as Sam Harris says it’s the only thing in the entire universe that cannot be an illusion. Even if everything else is fake and the entire universe is just a hallucination/simulation the fact that it feels like something to be in that simulation is still true.
It’s weird! It’s something so fundamental yet if you weren’t experiencing it yourself you’d have no idea it’s even a thing. There’s zero evidence for it outside of the mind itself.
Just a random thought, this reminds me of light. Kinda weird to think about but light is invisible unless it goes directly into your eyes.
Also as Sam Harris says it’s the only thing in the entire universe that cannot be an illusion. Even if everything else is fake and the entire universe is just a hallucination/simulation the fact that it feels like something to be in that simulation is still true.
Very very strange.
This and time too. You ask the oracle about consciousness, I’ll ask about time lol.
“I think therefore I am” … does that also mean “I thought therefore I was”? or something like that?
“I think therefore I am” … does that also mean “I thought therefore I was”? or something like that?
No, theoretically your whole memory could be an illusion.
Now assume I’m the oracle.
Time is the passage of the story that you are/exist in.
In some more general sense, the universe doesn’t so much exist as a physical, real world, but as a story, dream or thought. In that story, you move forward like water flows in a river. That way you experience the passage of time. The landscape already exists, only you get to see it bit by bit. You’re welcome.
Yes, a few times. Each time I went from feeling awake and alert to suddenly being somewhere else and feeling groggy and hungry. Nothing strange otherwise.
When I woke up I was like “oh I’m sorry, I must have fallen asleep.” The nurse just laughed then it hit me, I was supposed to fall asleep. Lol
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I had general anesthesia, some kind of pretty strong opioid. “10… 9… 8…”, then the room felt like it was spinning very briefly before everything went black. Only thing I remember about coming out of it was a sore throat due to intubation.
I’ve had one surgery in my teens. I was immediately knocked out, unconscious, no dreams that I can recall. When I woke up I was so groggy I couldn’t even really move for a while, everything just felt heavy. I would just kind of look around with my eyes and then close them to try to get more sleep.
I don’t think they knocked me out enough last time. I woke up from a 4.5hr surgery well rested and even dreamed. I scared the nurse right next to my recovery bed because they had just wheeled me in and didn’t expect me to be awake yet. I asked for my glasses and noticed everyone in the big level 1 recovery room was still sleeping. So I cracked some jokes. I then asked her how long the surgery has been because it felt like a while (was supposed to be 3hrs). She got a little freaked out and called the doctor who explained the surgery went a little longer due to some precision needed. I remember every moment from when I woke up to when they put me in the level 2 recovery room and was being walked to the car like 5mins later. I was a little bummed because I asked my husband to record me saying anything silly and he had nothing to work with except me thanking every single nurse I saw.
It wasn’t general, but I lost the memory. Sort of. Signed up for a study involving donating my wisdom teeth. Got them pulled for free in return. They described how they were gonna give me an “amnesiac drug” which would help me forget the whole disturbing experience, or maybe even forget the pain I don’t know.
I sat down in a dentist’s chair. A lady in scrubs came in and said “Do you like drugs?”
“Yes”
“Then you’re gonna love this. Start counting backward from 100 for me.”
So I started counting down and then I came to walking down the hallway pushing an IV thing. I was walking toward the waiting room after the procedure.
What’s strange is the memory of them taking my teeth out isn’t gone, it’s just squished down to like 5 seconds. The entire thing, like a move in ultra fast forward. My head whipping back and forth as pliers grip and there are crunching sounds. But it’s all ultra fast.
As my steezy took pains to point out, general anesthesia is not sedation. General means you cannot breathe on your own. Sedation (like with propofol) means you can still breathe, but you have no working memory of what happens.
I’ve had sedation administered a few times in the past few years, two colonoscopies and a bone spur shave on my big toe.
Colonoscopies are fairly quick, maybe 30-45 minutes for the full procedure. There was a burn in my vein in as the injection was administered via IV, followed shortly by a dizziness that wasn’t altogether unpleasant. Next thing I know, I’m waking up in recovery. The dizziness lasted for about 7-10 minutes. Felt about 90% good for the rest of the day, 100% the next.
For the bone spur, I was out for about 2 hours. Experience was similar, except it took quite a bit longer for the propofol dizziness to wear off, maybe 4-5 hours. Not that I was going to drive anywhere with a recently operated toe, but there’s no way I would have tried. After a good night’s sleep, I felt 100% next day.
I fear anesthesia too much because I have those “redheads need a higher dose of anesthesia” genes even though I myself am not a “true” redhead.
Just went under for the first time a few days ago. Pretty sure the Xanax they gave me prior knocked me out before the anesthesia did. Only memory was getting up on the operating table then a few hours after I got home. No memory of anesthesia, waking up after the surgery or getting home. Woke up feeling groggy and didn’t realize ~10 hours passed. Couldn’t stand up and walk on my own until the next morning.
Loss of time. Scary, because apparently I was lucid for the ride home, talked with my friend who picked me up, but I remember NONE of it. Also, constipation.
Once. Quite recently. Uh, nothing weird happened really.
While I was being administered, I could feel my eyesight drift upwards and I got clear memory of everything, including asking the doctor if they weren’t going to ask me to do a countdown or to talk about a certain topic like my favorite show as I drift. I can recreate the entire conversation up to the moment I knew I was about to lose conscience and just let my head lean a bit for comfort.
However, once I woke up again, I had a full conversation with my wife and I remember exactly 50% of it. I did not slur words nor say anything weird. I moved myself from the stretcher to the bed on my own apparently, but no memory. I was basically fully in control of my own agency… except for the fact I was extremely prone to falling asleep on the spot, and my brain was basically refusing to retain most of it. I even had to pee to a container and apparently managed to do it without causing a mess despite falling asleep on it, and then waking up to hand over the container. Anything you asked, I could easily reply, and I was clearly listening to requests, but if you ask me to tell what was spoken and in what order, I’ll fail you even tho I can recognize the event.
One thing I do not remember is the two nurses in the post-op room calling my name to check if I was good or any of the stretcher movement stuff. They did ask me what to call out beforehand, and said there was a procedure for checking on you before sending you to back to the overnight patient room, but that was the last I’ve seen them. Probably.
So, basically, that’s it. Large blackout, then groggy with memory loss. Then normal.
I’ve been under a few times but the most memorable (in one sense) was when I had some minor surgery as a kid. From my point of view, it was like teleportation: I was in the operating room, I blinked, and I was suddenly on a bed in a completely different room. No sense of the passage of time.
You pass out, and then you wake up with no memory of anything that happened in the meantime.
That is, unless they messed up the dosage and allowed you to regain consciousness. It happened to me once as a kid, I had to have a tooth removed but I was so scared that they had to put me under, but I woke up briefly during the operation and I remember the surgeon giving me nitrous oxide (I think that’s what it was, because it had this sweet smell and taste) with a mask and telling my mom (who was in the operating room), “let’s turn this down a little bit so we don’t pass out too”. Then I passed out again and woke up in the recovery unit.
