Art by smbc-comics
Consciousness is often said to disappear in deep, dreamless sleep. We argue that this assumption is oversimplified. Unless dreamless sleep is defined as unconscious from the outset there are good empirical and theoretical reasons for saying that a range of different types of sleep experience, some of which are distinct from dreaming, can occur in all stages of sleep.
Pubmed Articles
Does Consciousness Disappear in Dreamless Sleep?
Sciencealert Article We Were Wrong About Consciousness Disappearing in Dreamless Sleep, Say Scientists
Thats exactly what some do, depends on the anesthetic, but it doesn’t matter because if a memory never forms it may as well not have happened.
That is an interesting philosophical question.
If suffering is not remembered, was there even suffering? And if there was, does it matter? I can think of a few counterexamples of that, for example: a killer who tortures his victim before killing them.
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Physical abuse tends to leave some physical consequences. You’d have to come up with an example where there would be neither physical not psychological consequences… but even getting anesthesized against one’s will is already a consequence.
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That article is a mix of several cases.
One of those you might call going against the wishes of the patient… then again, that’s quite common in the ER, patients are yet to be established as “sound of mind” and capable of deciding for themselves, so an ER doctor can overrule them, including sedating to perform any procedures they consider necessary.
Others seem like letting students perform a non-vital part of a procedure, which is both expected from University/teaching hospitals, and in my personal experience was spelled out in the consent form (although they never told me personally, so if I hadn’t read it, I wouldn’t know).
None of those are. Communication could be improved, and I personally get pissed when medical personnel switches from “medical adult talk” to “patient baby talk” right in front of me… but I’ve also seen patients get upset because they didn’t understand what was being talked about, and had to be calmed down with “baby talk”… so it’s a difficult issue overall.
Presumably in your scenario the victim remembers the torture though.
In the case of general anaesthetic the memory is effectively considered to be deleted in real time. On its way through the brain it ceases to exist so it never reaches the conscious mind.
There was a case of a guy, where they botched the anesthesia, and he was just paralyzed but conscious the whole time during some invasive surgery. They realized their mistake, and tried to fix it by giving him some amnesic so he wouldn’t retain the memories.
After getting discharged, he wouldn’t remember anything… but kept having nightmares, and a few weeks later took his own life.
So it seems like memories don’t need to be fully formed to mess one up.
That sounds like the mechanism might be different though, but yeah some percentage of people wake up during surgery while the paralytic is still in effect, they closely monitor the heart rate for sudden spikes because of this I believe. It sounds horrifying to me, but then I remember that there was a time when anesthetics didn’t exist.