What is the physiological difference between sleep, unconsciousness and anaesthesia?
In: Biology
Lets try and relate this to how you might see it with a computer.
Sleep: Is an orderly process of shutting down. Buffers are flushed and processed are stopped in an orderly and predictable manner. And becoming awake is the reverse where things start back up in a similar orderly manner.
Anesthesia: Is more like a suspend or hibernate mode. There is no gradual shutdown, you are running like normal one moment and the next you are not running (so to speak). Aside from baseline processes everything is just stopped or suspended.
Unconsciousness: This ‘normally’ happens when something goes wrong. Going into shock, having a bad reaction, getting hit in the head, etc. It’s like your computer crashing and getting a BSOD. Notable is the loss of data (like in a blackout): one moment you might be fine and the next you are laying on the floor with no memory of anything in between the two.
I probably butchered this bad but you should get the point.
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