Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it's a popular view nowadays among psychologists and cognitive scientists that the conscious self is just a sort of a senior manager that receives reports and thinks he's in charge while in fact his subordinates work just fine even when he's temporarily not available at all.
Well, it's an interesting point, because apparently if the tape recorder never turns back on, you're just kinda stuck in time as the person you were. So it suggests at the least that the tape recorder aspect of consciousness, perhaps in the way it feeds back one's perception of oneself to oneself, is crucial in the sort of consciousness we humans see as critical to identity. Clearly though, this guy is still "conscio…
After simple dental surgery, William lost his ability to form new memories
111–120 of 137 posts
Re: After simple dental surgery, William lost his ability to form new memories
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a problem with some of the drugs they use during C-sections, too. When my son was born by surprise Caesarean, I think that was one of the things my wife and I were most worried about - that she would have no memory whatsoever of our son's first few hours of life.
FWIW that happens even when no surgery takes place. The women have just gone through a pretty traumatic effort. It's funny how terribly my wife recalls the first hour after she gave birth.
No, this is more than that. It's certain sedatives that have anterograde amnesia as a side effect.
Re: After simple dental surgery, William lost his ability to form new memories
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read this book "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World" and based on that I would say your left hemisphere were active when right one was suppressed for some time. I can't recommend this book highly enough - it's very comprehensive and it give you an opportunity to look at the world from a different perspective
I also highly recommend that book. I wonder whether I'd consider this a hemispheric situation. It seems to me like the internal, autobiographic self being disabled, and then upon awakening this self immediately says "wait, discontinuity in the recording ... where was I?" and this feeds back into the rest of the brain creating the confusion. He wasn't confused the moment before, because his autobiographical self wasn'…
For me the main sign is the different behaviour. Left hemisphere is vile, ignorant and selfish. Threatening a doctor with death because he hurt you falls in the being sociopathic bastard category. This is my highly uneducated guess
Re: After simple dental surgery, William lost his ability to form new memories
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Midaz can be used as premedication before induction of general anesthesia, but it's not an induction agent itself. If you're getting general (as opposed to "twilight") anesthesia, once you're induced, you should be unconscious (to the best of our ability to understand consciousness). I'm medicine, not anesthesia, so I don't use these agents all day and therefore referred to cardioversion which is more in my domain. C…
I am noting with interest and a small amount of alarm the abruptness with which you've ejected yourself from this thread after my suggestion that all of anesthesia is a huge scam. :)
FWIW, unlikely. I specifically remember being asked to count down from 10, going like 8 7 6 ... 5 wait I feel weird and sleepy. That is, my first thought after being woken up was the next number in sequence.
It seems unlikely that would be the case if the time inbetween was spent thinking 'oh my god this hurts so much' rather than just blacked out.
Re: After simple dental surgery, William lost his ability to form new memories
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am noting with interest and a small amount of alarm the abruptness with which you've ejected yourself from this thread after my suggestion that all of anesthesia is a huge scam. :)
FWIW, unlikely. I specifically remember being asked to count down from 10, going like 8 7 6 ... 5 wait I feel weird and sleepy. That is, my first thought after being woken up was the next number in sequence. It seems unlikely that would be the case if the time inbetween was spent thinking 'oh my god this hurts so much' rather than just blacked out.
Were you given a benzo specifically to erase your memory of the events? Because this thread is about the fact that many (maybe most) surgical patients are.
(Let me clear, I'm being deliberately silly about all this. I do not think there is a huge anesthesia conspiracy. I am, at the same time, seriously skeeved out by having my memory deliberately tampered with.)
Re: After simple dental surgery, William lost his ability to form new memories
#116The doctors initially suspected that he’d reacted badly to the anaesthetic, causing a brain haemorrhage – yet they failed to find evidence of injury. So he was discharged with the mystery still hanging over him, and the family moved back to England, where he was referred to the office of Gerald Burgess, a clinical psychologist in Leicester. Scouring the medical literature, he found five similar cases of mysterious me…
I felt the same as well. It was an interesting read, but also felt "link-baity".
(P.S. I will be using that word from now on.)
Re: After simple dental surgery, William lost his ability to form new memories
#117There's a great movie by Christopher Nolan about exactly this condition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_%28film%29 http://letterboxd.com/film/memento/ Highly recommended.
Re: After simple dental surgery, William lost his ability to form new memories
#118The doctors initially suspected that he’d reacted badly to the anaesthetic, causing a brain haemorrhage – yet they failed to find evidence of injury. So he was discharged with the mystery still hanging over him, and the family moved back to England, where he was referred to the office of Gerald Burgess, a clinical psychologist in Leicester. Scouring the medical literature, he found five similar cases of mysterious me…
Earlier this year I had a medical procedure and was given "twilight" anesthesia. I was explicitly told "you need to have your spouse or a friend here because we're going to give you instructions afterward and you probably won't remember it". And, sure enough, my memory was pretty much wiped for the hour or so after the event. Later that evening I had a conversation with my wife that went like this: "Um, did you help…
I've been through that as well.
It was incredibly unnerving(to me anyway). The frightening part was more how would I ever know if it happened again.
I've been a little paranoid trusting myself after it.
Re: After simple dental surgery, William lost his ability to form new memories
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that anesthesiologists apparently deliberately induce amnesia with benzos scares the shit out of me, much more so than full general anesthesia does (which seems backwards, right, because general anesthesia is actually dangerous). Why do they want me not to remember anything? Is it that horrible?
Not to mention that they are free to literally ask you anything and you won't even know what the questions were or what your answers were.
I talk in my sleep and my father and some roommates have had full conversations with me, to include them asking me questions and me answering them. The upshot is that I apparently don't always give accurate answers. For example, one roommate recounted me insisting that I needed to fill up the water tank in my car. When asked what I was talking about, I responded along the lines of "you know, so it will have power to drive". Not only was the "water tank" portion problematic, I didn't even have a car at the time.
Re: After simple dental surgery, William lost his ability to form new memories
#120There's a great movie by Christopher Nolan about exactly this condition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_%28film%29 http://letterboxd.com/film/memento/ Highly recommended.
There is also a mediocre but surprisingly endearing Adam Sandler movie about this condition.