I recently inadvertently read—it happens!—about anesthesia. I’ve been relatively healthy for most of my adult life and have experienced anesthesia only for dental surgery and colonoscopies. I’ve actually written about the experience here before: the experience of anesthesia is not like sleep. You awake like you’ve just been born. You weren’t, and then suddenly you are. This always puzzled me because consciousness is something nobody fully understands and there is a wide opinion-spread on what happens to it when your body dies. (I have opinions, backed by evidence, about this, but that’s for another time.) What I read about anesthesia made a lot of sense of this conundrum, but it doesn’t answer the question of what consciousness is. What I learned is this: anesthesiologists often include amnestics (chemicals that make you forget) in their cocktail. That is, you may be awake, or partially so, during the procedure, but when you become conscious again you can’t remember it.
Now, that may bother some people, but for me it raises very interesting issues. One is that I had no idea amnestics existed. (It certainly sheds new light on those who claim alien abduction but who only remember under hypnosis.) Who knew that even we have the ability to make people forget, chemically? That, dear reader, is a very scary thought. Tip your anesthesiologist well! For me, I don’t mind so much if I can’t remember it, but it does help answer that question of why emerging from anesthesia is not the same as waking up. Quite unrelated to this reading, I once watched a YouTube video of some prominent YouTubers (yes, that is a full-time job now) undergoing colonoscopies together. They filmed each other talking during the procedure, often to hilarious results. The point being, they were not fully asleep. The blankness I experience after my own colonoscopies is born of being made to forget.
I think I have a pretty good memory. Like most guys my age, I do forget things more easily—especially when work throws a thousand things at you simultaneously and you’re expected to catch and remember all of them. Forgetting things really bothers me. If you haven’t watched Christopher Nolan’s early film Memento, you should. I think I remember including it in Holy Horror. In any case, I don’t mind if anesthesiologists determine that it’s better to forget what might’ve happened when the last thing I remember is having been in an extremely compromised position in front of total strangers of both genders. My accidental reading has solved one mystery for me, but it leaves open that persistent question of what consciousness really is.
