I’m curious what mechanism is at work here.
Edit: Thanks for the responses. I get it now. Obviously I am still enjoying the discussion RE: the finer points like memory, etc.
In: Biology
For starters, you can’t compare sleep and unconsciousness. Just because you’re not awake in both states, it doesn’t mean that they are the same. Sleep is a highly active state of (un)consciousness, in which the brain is going through different levels of sleep patterns. At some points, the brain is even more active when we are sleeping, compared to us being awake.
Drug induced anesthesia is a very complex mechanism and is executed differently, depending on surgery an patient. Shutting off the pain is not very hard, we have a variety of pain killers that do that pretty well. Unfortunately, they have a little side effect. The stronger the pain killer, the faster it stops you from breathing. That is one reason, why you are brought to unconsciousness. You would think, that giving you just the drug for “unconsciousness” is enough for the surgeons to operate on you, but that is not true. You are not “there” to experience, or remember anything (sometimes patients do wake up during surgery, but don’t feel or remember anything), but your body still reacts to pain. Your blood pressure rises, heart rate increases etc. These effects are counterproductive for surgery, that’s why you are given pain medication, even though you are unconscious.
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