So far year 26 has been full of a lot. We could call them events. I said that at about year 22 though, right before boarding my flight to Australia. I often find myself wanting to go back to that moment, where all the nerves decided to communicate a bit more with one another. Which reminded me…
Did you know that anesthesiologists still don’t know exactly how anesthesia works? How the drug causes a patient to be unconscious and unable to feel all the cuts and stitching. In physics this is called a black box, and it’s fascinating.
What scientists do know is that the neurons (or brain waves) continue firing under anesthesia. They don’t just stop as one may assume. They keep chattering, just at different times, on different schedules. All while a slow and distracting alpha wave in the front of the brain disables them from truly receiving information from one another.
Think of consciousness as the brain talking and listening to itself simultaneously. Whereas unconsciousness is the brain [waves] talking and listening but not to each other… unable to receive or consequently react to what they [the neurons] may hear, as they straight away start firing with their own agendas once a drug like ketamine is injected enough.
Outside of the surgery room I can’t help but see people as neurons, that just keep talking and talking and talking—typically at the same time, or close enough, or even interrupting one another. Their self-indulgence handicaps their true ability to receive. Then they go on in the world just talking, functioning of course, just unconsciousness. Unaware of what’s truly going on around them. Unable to feel and taste and stop. Stop and soak up the life that is happening around them, and at an unbelievingly fast rate. So fast that when we lie on our deathbed, whether it be a bed or not, we’ll wish life had moved slower. We’ll wish we had done all those “wild” things we wanted to do.
Isn’t it funny? The correlation between anesthesia and self-interest. Is there really much of a difference. The neurons keep talking at each other rather than with.
-C
Feature photo taken by Michael A. Nyffeler (Valencia, Spain)
Inspirational material for this post brought to you by RadioLab (Decoding the void)
