What stage of sleep are you in under anesthesia, and why does it feel like no time has passed?
In: Biology
Anesthesia does not cause sleep, it causes loss of consciousness. When you’re sleeping, your conscious mind is inattentive but still present and it can be woken up by stimuli from the outside world. When a person is under an anesthetic it prevents conscious thought all together, and the persons mind is effectively switched off. I say mind and not brain, because the brain continues to function, but thoughts and the ‘mind’ do not.
To make an analogy, if your mind is a computer program, running on a computer called the brain, then anesthesia is hitting ctrl+alt+del and killing consciousness.exe for awhile. Where as sleep is more like setting it to run in the background with decreased priority.
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