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

  • LanternEverywhere@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Sleep is NOTHING like death. You’re still experiencing lots of stuff, you still very much have a sense of self, you’re still thinking things, your brain is still processing lots of information.

    General anesthesia - now THAT is a real close period to what being dead is.

    • Lorindól@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      I’ve had general anesthesia, it was just like falling into a deep, dreamless sleep.

      If death is like that, then there’s absolutely nothing to be afraid of.

      • Vigge93@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Probably is. If they gave you a little too much anesthesia so you didn’t wake up, you would probably drift off the same, and then just not wake up.

        • Rambi@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          But that has already happened, of course you don’t fear something that has already occurred. People only fear what is yet to occur

        • thonofpy@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I do mind now. I’m quite bummed out about missing all the fun of the 20th century. And never getting to breathe truly clean air. Or having the athlete body of a gatherer. Messing around in trees with feet that can actually grip something.

      • BastingChemina@slrpnk.net
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        1 year ago

        For me when I had anesthesia I quickly closed my eyes with the surgeon talking, when I opened my eyes the surgeon was still talking so I was wondering when the surgery would start.

        Of course when I opened my eyes it was 5 hours later and after the surgery but it took me a while to realized that.

        • PixxlMan@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It’s pretty cool that you could just continue your thought after basically pausing your brain for five hours. Kind of like hibernation for a pc I guess.

      • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nl
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        1 year ago

        I’ve had general anesthesia, it was just like falling into a deep, dreamless sleep.

        What if anesthesia actually just blocks your memories and physical reactions, but you actually experience everything that happens to you in absolute terror?

        • CeeBee@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          What if anesthesia actually just blocks your memories and physical reactions, but you actually experience everything that happens to you in absolute terror?

          Latest studies with FMRIs and other tools have found that general anesthesia decouples the sections of the brain from each other. All the various parts of the brain stop communicating. It’s an entities different state than sleep based on the brain activity.

          Normally when we have various stimuli or are asleep, neural activity “flows” around from one section to the other. When under general anesthesia those flows are isolated and don’t connect to other sections of the brain.

          This has actually given us a huge clue as to where consciousness comes from and what makes it a thing.

          It also helps explain why going under is just lights out and no drama or anything. It’s like an off switch for the “person”.

        • kevinBLT@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nl
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            1 year ago

            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.

            • pinkdrunkenelephants@sopuli.xyz
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              1 year ago

              Uhh, yes and yes? What’s stopping a rapist from anesthesizing their victims before the act and using the fact that they did as an excuse to get off charges under your logic?

              • jarfil@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                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.

                • pinkdrunkenelephants@sopuli.xyz
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                  1 year ago

                  No it doesn’t, not always. Actually it’s routine for medical students to be brought in to give anesthesitized women pelvic exams without their knowledge and consent, and no one was the wiser until universities that did this announced it… https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/health/pelvic-medical-exam-unconscious.html

                  That is textbook rape right there, and it doesn’t often have physical consequences. Most women didn’t even know but doctors fucking did it anyway.

                  How you people have any faith in any aspect of society is beyond me.

                  EDIT: And now I’m being downvoted over it. Imagine being downvoted for pointing out rape occurs during surgical procedures, a well-established fact. Think about the implications of that

                  • jarfil@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    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).

                    That is textbook rape right there

                    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.

            • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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              1 year ago

              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.

          • jarfil@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            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.

            • kevinBLT@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              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.

        • NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I had to be put under a few years ago to extract wisdom teeth and I wouldn’t say I was 100% gone. I remember seeing the light through my eyelids, hearing muffled unintelligible voices, and feeling mild tension as they worked in my mouth, jostling my head around. No pain, but notable light sensations. It also felt like it was over in a minute for an hour and a half procedure. Was definitely a wild experience, but certainly no terror remembered, thankfully.

      • PixxlMan@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’m genuinely surprised that the idea that something bad might happen to you when you’re dead or that it could be painful etc is anywhere near as prevalent as it is. To me, that makes absolutely no sense. Of course dying might be painful… But death? Once you brain no longer works? Feels obvious to me that you won’t feel, well, anything. The thing that frightens me about death wouldn’t be the experience of being dead, but rather not being able to do any more things and not existing anymore.

        • Anamnesis@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          This reasoning goes all the way back to Epicurus. With regard to your latter points, Epicurus thought they were also solved by being dead. For someone to miss out on something, they have to exist in the first place. No person, no missing out. And for not existing to be bad, a person must be around to be upset about it.

        • ezures@lemmy.wtf
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          1 year ago

          The most scary stuff is just not doing or experiencing anything after death, at least for me. (Probably the biggest fomo on earth)

          • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            Life is a series of missed opportunities. When you choose to do something, you miss out on a multitude of other options. That is fine.

            But I get the FOMO, it took me a few years of active mindfulness to reign it in.

      • zeppo@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        What’s hard for me to accept is the idea of never waking up. It seems like it has to end sometime.

        • jdsquared@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          See for me I’m not sure why that’s hard to accept. I think I first heard it from Alan Watts, that there were billions of years of space before I was conscious, so why am I afraid of billions of years of nothing after I’m gone?

          • aberrate_junior_beatnik@midwest.social
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            1 year ago

            Not having something in the first place and losing something you have are two different things. It’s like saying to someone who just lost their partner “don’t feel bad, for the first n years of your life you didn’t have a partner and you were fine”

            Additionally, it’s not billions of years of nothing. It’s an eternity of nothing. Billions of years may as well be the blink of an eye relative to eternity.

            God, I’m getting anxious just talking about it.

          • zeppo@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I didn’t say i was afraid of it, just that it seemed unlikely. The billions before you were conscious ended somehow, right?

          • BigNote@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            It’s not rational. Evolution has hardwired us and every other organism that has the necessary neural architecture to fear death and seek to avoid it. A species that didn’t have an instinctive and heritable aversion to death would not last very long.

    • Anamnesis@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      When I’m asleep I’m not experiencing shit. Close eyes, moment of black, awake again the next day.