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.
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.
I believe that the universe is not all “materia”, but that an important part of it is pure movement, that can also take the shape of moving material. If we perceive something through our eyes, then movement (train passing by) acts on itself (the eyes), and that gives rise to the structure of the story, which is consciousness.
This seems to fit well with one of the explanations for what the brain actually is doing or atleast one of the processes running which is trying to guess what happens next.
That seems plausible in my mind.
So like am I the only one[tm] who felt like time did pass, actually, while I was under? It was like being deeply asleep.
Oh god the grogginess. One of the worst feelings
IMO it’s not a big deal as long as you know to expect it. If you know about it then you won’t be fighting crazy hard against it and thinking that something is wrong with you that you can’t make yourself fully awake. If you know about it before it happens then you know to not fight it, just relax and wait for the drugs to wear out of your system. They really should tell patients to expect the grogginess right before they’re put under.
It isn’t like anything. One moment you are counting down, the very next moment you are waking up. Time does not pass for you. It’s one instant (counting down) to the next (waking up.) It’s very strange. Like you skipped through time. Like you magically moved forward in time instantaneously. You will never have memories from when you are under.
Honestly, I’ve wished that experience was possible for other times. I know it’s dangerous and that’s why it’s not. But general anesthesia is just such a better experience than local. Eg, I had a dental filling the other day. That uses local anesthesia and it’s quite stressful (especially as my first time undergoing that). I found myself wishing it was as convenient as how general anesthesia is just blink and it’s done.
I also wish it were so easy to fall asleep. It sucks tossing and turning at night (especially when there’s something big going on the next day, which only makes it harder to fall asleep), knowing how anesthesia can knock you out in seconds. My understanding is that anesthesia isn’t sleep and won’t give you the benefits of sleep, but the experience of drifting off so fast is still what I want from sleep.
I’ll give you a piece of advice that’s been very valuable to me, especially in the case of getting injections, which is always difficult for me. In the lead up to a local anaesthetic, and during, take a short-to-normal inhale through your nose (depending on your lung tolerance) and do a loooong, extended exhale, as long as you can extend it without needing to take too big a gulp afterwards. When you exhale, this pushes your diaphragm up into your heart, slowing your heart rate down and significantly decreasing the physical effects of anxiety.
It works very, very quickly, and if you do it for up to 5 minutes, the heartrate lowering effect can last several hours. Doing it regularly (5-10 minutes a day) has long term positive effects for your overall cardiovascular health, too.
I’ve never been one for meditation, but practices like that have probably been helpful to so many people because it naturally takes advantage of the relationship between breathing patterns and heart rate variability.
There are even more ‘tricks’ like this, such as the double inhale. Taking two very quick breaths in succession before that long exhale is even better at reducing your heart rate and generally calming you down. You’ve even done it before, but you wouldn’t know it.
Children in particular will do this, and it can happen naturally when you’re sobbing. Sometimes you’ll take two short inhales like “huh, huh!” before going in for another cry rather than one big gasp- and this is why!
I hope this really helps you out, because it’s very quick and straightforward, but boy does it work fast. Sometimes I’ve only remembered to-do it halfway through an unpleasant experience and it still banishes burgeoning pre-syncope and nausea. Good luck!
Instantaneous time warp. One moment, I’m relaxing on the table before the procedure. Next moment, I’m being told the procedure’s done.
It’s like a human
SIGSTOP, for all you programmers out there.Yeah they put the tube in and I woke up 6 hours later. I was literally turned off and on.
The profound nothingness is almost hard to believe. I’m not talking an empty sleep—I mean it feels like someone cut a segment out of the film strip of your life.
The first time I was fully knocked out like that was for tooth surgery, and I thought the doctor was messing with me when he said they were done already—from my perspective I had barely closed my eyes for a moment. Sure enough, there was gauze in my mouth and the sun was setting outside. It had been over 90 minutes, and I didn’t even feel like I’d slept.
Wisdoms? Same experience for me. My partner was in the room with a nurse asking me about my pain level. At first I was confused, what pain? Then as consciousness properly barrelled in I managed to sob an ‘8’ through the gauze. I preferred oblivion at that point - they had to take a big chunk of bone and boy did I know it at that moment
I’m kind of sad that I never got to experience that, to be honest. I only had two wisdom teeth- 1 on the top left and 1 on the bottom right. The right was set to be impacted, but apparently it hadn’t grown any roots, yet (I was 17 or 18) so they decided it just get it out with a local. It was… unpleasant. The top left one has never come through, either, so I may well not have bothered 😓
Haha don’t have FOMO for surgery, mate. A life lived without it is a good one.
They can still wreak havoc on your teeth even if they don’t come down. They tend to migrate and move and that can mess up your bite. So not likely now presuming you’re older but it’s a chance when you’re younger and still growing etc.
Yeah I’m 30, now. I presume they’re just chilling, lol. Has anyone’s come down after that point, do you think?
Not that I saw when I worked there. My impacted wisdoms only became an issue in my 30s though, so who knows?!
It’s so weird to me that you’re all put under for wisdom teeth. I’ve had three out with local and nobody even suggested I might need a general.
It can depend on how complicated your impaction is. Sometimes they look at you and go, “Yeah I can work that out no issues,” other times they’ll be like, “Nah fuck that, this is going to be a major surgery.” The last thing you want is for them to realise it’s the latter and not the former when they’re halfway through the procedure 😅
I’ve heard of that happening, actually; the dentist ended up driving the patient around themselves trying to find an available surgeon to finish the job, and eventually gave up and just dropped them off at the emergency department.
Usually it’s not that wild, but I feel safe in assuming that many dentists choose to book a general out of an abundance of caution, 'cause I’m sure that scenario features in their nightmares as much as it does the patient’s.
It probably has something to do with licensing and costs for anaesthetists, too, come to think. Most dentists are qualified to give locals but not generals; verrryyy different ballgame, you can imagine.
Oh yeah, and finally, people’s jaws are getting smaller. Seriously, though. The smaller the jaws, the more complicated dental surgeries are becoming, so there you go.
Was a dental nurse once upon a time. Assisted with many an extraction. Yes if conditions are good (the jaw is large, the tooth is straight, there’s no tangling or bone issues) then not a problem. But I did not enjoy putting some people with poor neck strength in headlocks. Or the post extraction vomiting. Or the way the patient cringed as they heard the tooth snap in their skull. Or the complete look of trauma on their face after.
Just because they couldn’t feel pain didn’t mean the experience wasn’t harrowing. I needed to go under because all 4 were badly impacted. But having insider knowledge on the process, I would’ve chosen to be knocked out regardless.
what’s it like coming back.
Waking up and asking the same questions over and over. “It’s over?” “We’re done?” “It already happened?”
Arm feels cold as it goes in, the feeling spreads, taste of copper in the mouth… wake up in recovery. Pretty straightforward.
When I got my wisdom teeth pulled I was put in general anesthesia. Funnily enough, like everyone probably, I tried staying awake. Doc told me to count down from 10, I was very determined to get it done, just closed my eyes for a bit but I managed to pull it off. Only thing is, that I was out between 6 and 5, and counted half the numbers in the wake up room. It’s literally like a time warp. Super interesting imo.
Went in for emergency surgery as a kid. I vividly remember the last few seconds, someone turned on the radio with heavy metal and the surgeon said “let’s do this.”
That’s a hilarious thing to say out of context.
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8 weeks ago, June 26. I remember getting ready, they put an IV in. I don’t remember anything after that until I woke up. When I woke up I was shivering, but I wasn’t actually cold. They immediately gave me some cookies and water and 2 Oxycodone pills and I got dressed and my mother-in-law took me to her place where I was staying the night.
Best sleep I’ve ever had in my life.
I remember thinking it’s taking surprisingly long for the gas over my mouth and nose to do anything. A pretty surgical assistant was staring at my eyes and talking to me calmly, saying I was doing great. And I was doing great. Then the next moment I was suddenly startled awake again as completely different people were shouting and holding my arms, trying to bring me back to consciousness as I was flailing around in confusion. Apparently the surgery went well.
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
I actually have a story. I was very young and was under for 10 hours. It was terrible, I felt every moment, I was trapped in a video game, Link’s Adventure. Just repeating over and over. This isn’t a joke, the experience was so traumatizing I won’t go through surgery again. This was over three decades ago. I don’t know what went wrong, why I experienced the passage of time. I thought I had literally gone to Hell, it was torture.
God that sounds terrifying
Would be pretty interesting to get the opinion of an anesthesiologist on this, I’m sure they could make a different cocktail to make sure any future surgery goes well :)
I remember them probing my arm for veins, then the surgery was over. Nothing in between, not even blackness.
