Art by smbc-comics
Consciousness is often said to disappear in deep, dreamless sleep. We argue that this assumption is oversimplified. Unless dreamless sleep is defined as unconscious from the outset there are good empirical and theoretical reasons for saying that a range of different types of sleep experience, some of which are distinct from dreaming, can occur in all stages of sleep.
Pubmed Articles
Does Consciousness Disappear in Dreamless Sleep?
Sciencealert Article We Were Wrong About Consciousness Disappearing in Dreamless Sleep, Say Scientists
What if anesthesia actually just blocks your memories and physical reactions, but you actually experience everything that happens to you in absolute terror?
Latest studies with FMRIs and other tools have found that general anesthesia decouples the sections of the brain from each other. All the various parts of the brain stop communicating. It’s an entities different state than sleep based on the brain activity.
Normally when we have various stimuli or are asleep, neural activity “flows” around from one section to the other. When under general anesthesia those flows are isolated and don’t connect to other sections of the brain.
This has actually given us a huge clue as to where consciousness comes from and what makes it a thing.
It also helps explain why going under is just lights out and no drama or anything. It’s like an off switch for the “person”.
Thats exactly what some do, depends on the anesthetic, but it doesn’t matter because if a memory never forms it may as well not have happened.
That is an interesting philosophical question.
If suffering is not remembered, was there even suffering? And if there was, does it matter? I can think of a few counterexamples of that, for example: a killer who tortures his victim before killing them.
Presumably in your scenario the victim remembers the torture though.
In the case of general anaesthetic the memory is effectively considered to be deleted in real time. On its way through the brain it ceases to exist so it never reaches the conscious mind.
There was a case of a guy, where they botched the anesthesia, and he was just paralyzed but conscious the whole time during some invasive surgery. They realized their mistake, and tried to fix it by giving him some amnesic so he wouldn’t retain the memories.
After getting discharged, he wouldn’t remember anything… but kept having nightmares, and a few weeks later took his own life.
So it seems like memories don’t need to be fully formed to mess one up.
That sounds like the mechanism might be different though, but yeah some percentage of people wake up during surgery while the paralytic is still in effect, they closely monitor the heart rate for sudden spikes because of this I believe. It sounds horrifying to me, but then I remember that there was a time when anesthetics didn’t exist.
I had to be put under a few years ago to extract wisdom teeth and I wouldn’t say I was 100% gone. I remember seeing the light through my eyelids, hearing muffled unintelligible voices, and feeling mild tension as they worked in my mouth, jostling my head around. No pain, but notable light sensations. It also felt like it was over in a minute for an hour and a half procedure. Was definitely a wild experience, but certainly no terror remembered, thankfully.