What state of mind do we go into while under anesthesia? Are we asleep? Unconscious? Something different?
In: Biology
You are not asleep. Although you don’t move while asleep, there is a lot of activity going on in your brain.
We aren’t exactly clear about what happens while you are medically unconscious, but it is not the same as regular sleep, as can be easily observed by doing brain activity scans. The drugs they give are known to have the general effects of unconsciousness, paralysis, and amnesia, which is to say you don’t respond to stimuli, you can’t move, and you don’t remember anything. The simplest guess as to what happens when you go under is just the combination of the three effects listed, but it is also possible that they interact in some other way.
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