{"id":8079,"date":"2018-07-03T19:10:58","date_gmt":"2018-07-03T23:10:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=8079"},"modified":"2018-07-04T04:43:40","modified_gmt":"2018-07-04T08:43:40","slug":"survival-mode","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=8079","title":{"rendered":"Survival mode"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I spent 20 minutes under general anesthesia this morning, and had an odd memory afterwards.<\/p>\n<p>It was nothing serious &#8211; my first screening colonoscopy, things looked OK, come back in five years &#8211; but I hadn&#8217;t been under general anesthesia in 40 years (since having molars removed as a teen) and I was self-monitoring carefully.<\/p>\n<p>When I came out of it, I brought with me two memories.  One was that I had been aware of people talking around me.  The anesthesiologist had told me that might happen, and I wouldn&#8217;t have been surprised by it anyway; I&#8217;ve read of that effect.<\/p>\n<p>This tells  you human beings are <em>really<\/em> social animals &#8211; so much so that we&#8217;re partially alert to people-talk even when we&#8217;re knocked out.  After all (gasp!) our <em>status<\/em> might change&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The odd thing I surfaced with was memory of some mental processing I&#8217;d been doing while unconscious.  It appears my brain was running in a sort of survival-alert loop, constantly evaluating whether it could hear or feel or smell danger cues sufficient to wake me up.  What I remembered was the operating noise of that loop running.<\/p>\n<p>Of course it makes complete evolutionary sense that we&#8217;d have a mechanism like that. And we behave like we do, too; unfamiliar noises wake us up from sleep, familiar ones don&#8217;t. There&#8217;s got to be some neural processing going on evaluating familiarity.<\/p>\n<p>What is odd is that I&#8217;ve never heard or read of anyone else remembering that operating noise.  I know of no term of art for it in science, nor any match to it in the literature of mystical introspection. It&#8217;s not the free-associative (&#8220;drunken monkey&#8221;) chatter beneath normal consciousness, but something much leaner and more task-focused: &#8220;Wake the boss? Wake the boss? Wake the boss?&#8230;&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I suppose it&#8217;s just barely possible I&#8217;m the first to both keep the memory and write about it &#8211; not many people have been experimental mystics for forty years and have my ability to <a href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=5069\">self-monitor<\/a>, and maybe there&#8217;s something about particular kinds of anesthesia that makes it easier not to lose continuity of consciousness than waking from normal sleep.<\/p>\n<p>Still, this seems unlikely. One would think there&#8217;d been enough mystics in auto accidents by now to collect reports on post-operative recovery that would include memories like this.<\/p>\n<p>Can any of my readers point at something relevant?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I spent 20 minutes under general anesthesia this morning, and had an odd memory afterwards. It was nothing serious &#8211; my first screening colonoscopy, things looked OK, come back in five years &#8211; but I hadn&#8217;t been under general anesthesia in 40 years (since having molars removed as a teen) and I was self-monitoring carefully.&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=8079\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Survival mode<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-psychology","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8079"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8079\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8082,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8079\/revisions\/8082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}