> No gap, no memory of going under or anything that happened in between. It's like the intervening time didn't happen.
I had the same experience 2 weeks ago when being put under with propofol.
They asked me to hold a mask against my face and to start counting and then that's it, I woke up in recovery.
It was like I blinked and the whole thing was over.
Did not feel anything 'coming on' or like I was loosing consciousness, I was fully conscious and aware of all my surroundings, and then, bang, was in recovery.
"Very hard to explain the speed with which you drop from awake to sort of sleeping to "there is no me". The way back is a bit slower but harder to pinpoint, but I knew something was different in the recovery room."
There was no perception of speed in my case.
I just have a distinct memory of a mask being put over my mouth and nose and the nurse/doctor telling me to count upwards... and then I was in the recovery room.
No gap, no memory of going under or anything that happened in between. It's like the intervening time didn't happen.
> When it works, you go from awake to awake again in an instant
That's my thought as well. Last time I was put under anesthesia I tried hard to think about how I was feeling. I went from awake with my eyes open to opening my eyes. I thought my eyes were already open? There is just literally nothing between that span of time.
It's like that except you don't wake? But it lasted an instant. How can something that passes in an instant last for infinity? It makes my brain hurt.
After propofol I came to mid-sentence. I immediately asked how long I’d been talking, as I had zero recollection of being awake or talking, and was told I’d been telling jokes non-stop for the last 5 minutes. When I say I have no memory of that, I mean like I have no feeling I even existed in the period between telling the doctor I was going under up until I apparently woke and was well into my spontaneous comedy routine.
> If you’ve ever awoken from general anesthesia, you know what death will be like
[citation needed]
I used to have a severe drug and alcohol problem. I once drank a bunch of beers and took 3 or 4 times the recommended dose of Ativan. I woke up 24 hours later from a blackout and discovered in that time I had walked to the store and bought more beer and some snacks. I had absolutely no memory of it.
So I'm going to say anesthesia is not like being dead. It's more like switching the memory recorder off.
Not propofol specific, as I'm not sure what I was administered, but "rebooted" is the best way I've found to explain it. I've only been put under once, and similarly for knee surgery.
After everything was prepped, my surgeon and I were chatting about something and the last thing I recall was the anesthesiologist putting the mask on me and saying "nemasu" (Japanese for "sleep").
There was no countdown, no drowsiness, no sleepiness -- I was just gone and then waking up post surgery. It felt as though no time had passed, but it had been hours. Completely and utterly trippy.
> Because then you're under, you can even be "interactive" but you're not conscious of it because your short term memory has been disabled.
I don't find this convincing. If you asked someone under such anesthesia if they were currently conscious, they'd probably say "yes". Doesn't it seem more likely that you just don't remember having been conscious? If I magically wiped away a year's worth of your memory, does that retroactively mean you had actually been unconscious during that year?
My experience with general anaesthesia was exactly like that. I was talking about bikes with the surgeon. 0 nanoseconds elapse. I'm waking up in another room.
> General anaesthesia and the idea you are actually awake but forget
Do you mean that this happens for some people? For me, GA felt like a very deep dream where I didn't notice falling asleep but I definitely remember what I dreamed.
> We know that we are currently conscious, and we presume that when we are deeply asleep, under anesthesia, or otherwise incapacitated that we are not conscious.
I slightly disagree with this one statement, but only because of my own perceptual experiences. When I am asleep I am sure I am conscious, partly because I have a lot of lucid dreams, but also, weirdly, I feel more aware of the passing of time while I am sleeping, than when I am awake and engrossed in an activity that I find exciting or interesting.
Additionally, when under anaesthesia, I’m not necessarily convinced that people are unconscious. I think their ability to communicate their conscious experience is inhibited but I think it’s quite plausible that they are conscious. Anaesthesia definitely interferes with people’s ability to recall events. When I have talked to anaesthesiologists about their perception of what it means to be conscious, a lot of them say that memory and recall is an important aspect to consciousness, however as rightly pointed out in this post, having no memory of an event doesn’t mean one wasn’t conscious of the event. I have certainly seen people wake up during anaesthesia as well, but thankfully due to the amnesic properties of some anaesthetic drugs, their memory of it is wiped and they do not recall waking up. More worryingly though, some people who appear to be completely unconscious, can recall having an awareness which is distressing both for them, and the person who was responsible for ensuring they were not conscious. These events make me skeptical about anaesthesia inducing unconsciousness, and rather I think it just incapacitates people, and in almost all cases, successfully erases their recall of events. Anaesthetic awareness is a relatively rare complication of anaesthesia.
Sometimes I think of consciousness as some kind of cognitive mirage where it appears to be something, but the closer you get to really being able to examine it, the further away it appears. Despite all of science and all the technological advances made, we can’t quite describe what consciousness is and I find it really fascinating.
Have to say my experience of propofol was pretty interesting.
It's this milky substance that is injected directly into your blood. The action seems to be super fast and super deep.
I remember the anesthetist talking to me while doing it, I think it's standard practice, and I pretty much vanished mid-sentence. As in, not just "I feel like I'm sleeping" that you get each morning or evening in bed, more like "time just vanished" kind of way.
Very hard to explain the speed with which you drop from awake to sort of sleeping to "there is no me". The way back is a bit slower but harder to pinpoint, but I knew something was different in the recovery room.
> So if your identity can be restored after sleep and anesthesia, why not after death as well?
I don't know the low level details about how the brain works but...
When you're sleeping and are under anesthesia your brain is still an organ that's alive. Your body as a whole exists and is functioning.
I don't think this can applied to death if our definition of death is that your skin, organs and cells decompose into nothingness relatively quickly. Over time you'll reduce into a pile of bones. Your brain, heart, lungs and everything else is long gone.
Your identity can only be restored at this point if you believe your identity is fully detached from your brain, in which case then you may believe your identity will continue to exist in an unknown state that as far as I know has never been measured or confirmed in human history. That is of course where lots of folks have different opinions.
I'm not here to sell anyone on my opinion but I have been under IV based anesthesia before. It's a legit pause button on what we perceive as our memory or consciousness. You drift into sleep within seconds and wake up as if nothing ever happened, then feel a little groggy along with deal with whatever side effects you were put under for and your doctor will tell you what you were responding to requests during the surgery which means you were able to do things like rest your arm in this position or look to the left, etc..
But the takeaway there is your memory has a gap that can't be accounted for. If your identity is composed of your memory and anesthesia is a combination of drugs that affects chemicals in your body to alter your brain into not remembering things then we've scientifically proven your memory is directly tied into your body (brain included), otherwise if it weren't then "you" wouldn't have been paused right?
Do you mean people answer the questions under propofol but afterwards have no recollection of the experience? If so that's exactly the type of thing I was thinking of
I wondered about this at one point. I'd been under full propofol sleep a couple of times due to knee operations, and the experience was quite interesting.
You fall out of consciousness insanely fast. One moment you're talking to the anaesthetist about your name, what you're there for. You feel a cool sensation where the needle is. Before it's grown to your whole arm, you've vanished. I mean you're not dreaming, you're gone.
The only way you know you were gone is that there's no sensation of time. When you sleep, you feel like there's time. Under propofol I felt like my arm was cold, then I was groggy and waking up. In one action.
Maybe it's like dying, I don't know. But there's definitely this "system was rebooted" sensation as you come back to consciousness.
I expect it is similar to loss of consciousness from anesthetic, like propofol: a few seconds of fading awareness followed by nothingness. The difference is you don't wake up and marvel at not remembering anything while under the effect of anesthetic.
You don't need to die to demonstrate that. General anesthesia suffices.
(FYI, for the benefit of those who have never experienced it, GA is a very different subjective experience from sleep. Even in dream-free sleep you wake up with a subjective sensation of time having passed. Not so with GA. The time you spend in GA is just completely gone. It feels like you went through a time warp.)
The article repeatedly gives the impression of an abrupt change, by using words like 'switched' and 'stopped', but the description used later makes it sound like a more 'normal', gradual process.
she gradually spoke more quietly or moved less and less until she drifted into unconsciousness.
That part of the process sounds very similar to someone undergoing anesthesia, or simply falling asleep. Though there are obvious differences.
So maybe that's what it feels like? Some people remember the feeling of going under, but maybe not the last few seconds of it.
Have you ever received anaesthesia? For me, it was one of the most surreal things I've ever experienced, including psychedelic experiences. The reason it was so surreal is because I have no internal chronology of the surgery (minor surgery to insert two pins into my left ring finger after it was broken). I was actively paying attention to the experience, and there was nothing in between going under and waking up in the recovery room. Not a blank void or an emptiness, not an internal hallucination, but nothing. The experience for me was very much like fading out on the table and almost immediately waking up in the recovery room. By comparison, a potent DMT experience gave me the experience of being pushed and pulled through a local time loop, with a disconnect between my internal chronology and my perception of time, and that was less surreal to me than just outright losing an hour.
The combination of these two events gives me the perception that time is not at all what the vast majority of people think it is, and that everyone most likely experiences the passage of time at a different rate. We all externally synchronize via clocks and measured time, so no matter how fast or slow you experience time, you're tethered to the unit of "seconds" in a fashion. That's honestly probably one of the things that contributes to the mistaken belief that we perceive objective reality, but that's honestly a hell of a tangent.
I had the same experience 2 weeks ago when being put under with propofol.
They asked me to hold a mask against my face and to start counting and then that's it, I woke up in recovery.
It was like I blinked and the whole thing was over.
Did not feel anything 'coming on' or like I was loosing consciousness, I was fully conscious and aware of all my surroundings, and then, bang, was in recovery.
Strange experience.
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