[HN Gopher] In kids, EEG monitoring of consciousness safely redu...
___________________________________________________________________
In kids, EEG monitoring of consciousness safely reduces anesthetic
use
Author : LorenDB
Score : 105 points
Date : 2025-04-30 13:46 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (news.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.mit.edu)
| Etheryte wrote:
| If the reporting is accurate, which is really not a given with
| MIT, this is great news. For all its upsides, general anesthesia
| is still dangerous and very rough on you, and all these effects
| are always amplified for young patients.
| louthy wrote:
| > very rough on you
|
| How so?
| Etheryte wrote:
| To start, the article gives a few good examples:
|
| > children sometimes wake up from anesthesia with a set of
| side effects including lack of eye contact, inconsolability,
| unawareness of surroundings, restlessness, and non-purposeful
| movements
|
| In general, a very simple mental model for general anesthesia
| is that it's an unnatural state for your body and your body
| will do its best to get rid of it, similar to say alcohol or
| drugs. This means systemic inflammation, stress on your
| cardiovascular system, liver and kidneys, brain, and so
| forth. Most all of these issues scale with how much
| anesthetic you receive, similar to a hangover being worse the
| more you drink.
|
| In other words, general anesthesia is rough on you just like
| getting black out drunk is, it's just more controlled and we
| do our best to try and limit the downsides because it's
| invaluable for surgery where applicable.
| logifail wrote:
| > In other words, general anesthesia is rough on you
|
| Can confirm having watched our kids recover from general
| anesthesia multiple times.
|
| Full disclosure: have three kids, eldest child at lifetime
| total of 4x general anesthesia so far (1x for endoscopy, 3x
| for surgery), youngest child lifetime total of two (1x
| endoscopy, 1x dental work). Middle child seems to have
| escaped so far... he asked recently what it was like,
| siblings answered unanimously - "terrible".
| aziaziazi wrote:
| Rough like the roughest hangover you can have.
|
| I had a general anesthesia at 21 for dental surgery. The come
| back was a nightmare: nausea, shaking, cold and hot
| alternating, terrible headache, cramps, exhausted and
| mentally depressed during ~2 days. I couldn't eat, I couldn't
| drink (but brute force myself to do it), I couldn't think or
| concentrate on anything but the pain. The only close
| experience I can remember is the wake up after a blackout
| hangover but it really wasn't that bad compare to the
| anesthesia.
|
| 6 years later a car crash required artificial coma during 3
| days. They drug me along the week following my come back. The
| dreams during the last day of coma and that week took me
| through fascinating and terrifying experiences half _real_
| (intubation, interactions with family and medics...) and
| _imaginary_ (ever-repeting-same-day, interns having a
| fireplace in the ICU floor with guitars, mind-controlled bed
| to move around the room...). They finally gradually stop the
| drug and I was only a bit angry and physically suffering from
| my injuries but not _that_ bad.
|
| Big up to the amazing Royal Perth Hospital team for that
| amazing care. They saved my life and made the process a
| confortable trip.
|
| I always wonder what was that drug that produce so weird
| half-wake dreams with not much side effects. And why they
| don't always use that for dental surgery and everything else.
| I heard hypnosis can work instead of a classical general
| anesthesia and am keen to try if the funny Australian drug
| isn't an option. Everything but not the general anesthesia.
|
| edit: wonder if both experiences could have been the same
| sedative drug but the second had a hypnotic wake-up parachute
| drug during the comeback.
| holowoodman wrote:
| Probably Ketamine.
| louthy wrote:
| > Rough like the roughest hangover you can have
|
| I've had one for an operation on a broken jaw, just didn't
| think it was particularly rough. Of course it takes time to
| come round and be clear headed, but the OP kinda implied
| serious physical problems with "dangerous and very rough on
| you". Maybe I just misunderstood what they were saying, but
| I thought they meant rough as in long lasting damage (which
| I didn't think was the case), not temporary discomfort.
|
| Your situation obviously isn't ideal, but doesn't have the
| same implication.
|
| > I always wonder what was that drug that produce so weird
| half-wake dreams
|
| The sibling comment here mentions Ketamine, which is
| possible, but if they're giving that to you intravenously
| then all perception of time and space will be warped. It's
| extreme. So wild dreams is one thing, questioning what is
| even real is more like ketamine.
|
| It is after effect free though and doesn't last long, so
| once stopped you can be over it within the hour. It also
| has antidepressant effects afterwards.
| nchase wrote:
| I had anesthesia for a surgery at age 15 and I was depressed
| for a year afterward.
|
| I'm sure everyone's experience is different, but it made me
| feel groggy in a way that was difficult to bounce back from.
| holowoodman wrote:
| "Kids don't need anesthetics. If they are young enough, they
| won't remember the pain, so you can just operate without
| anesthetics. They are also easier to restrain than adults."
|
| This was state of the art in medicine for quite some time. I fear
| the general trend of "medication bad" will get us back to those
| dark times.
|
| Btw, those dark times ended only as recently as 1987!
| https://www.newsweek.com/when-doctors-start-using-anesthesia...
| throwanem wrote:
| This research is aimed precisely at making it safe enough to
| administer general anesthesia in these populations for that to
| become standard of care.
|
| Let me preempt one possible line here: I do not love the
| circumstances under which I would have been circumcised as a
| neonate in Mississippi in the very early 1980s, and _I do not
| resent the result._ Living that far tied up in the past is for
| men who can 't figure out how to do anything else. I am not one
| of those and despite an essential sympathy with the theoretical
| basis of their position that no putative benefit remotely
| justifies the the risk of the intervention, I have a short way
| with "intactivists."
|
| But if it had been possible safely to administer more than EMLA
| (perhaps!) for pain relief, not even in that place and time
| would anyone be so barbaric as to refuse it. Of _course._ And
| that, making possible that precise measure of mercy in the case
| where the intervention is _not_ merely cosmetic, is exactly
| that at which this research is directed. So, to anyone looking
| to make a cause of the ghosts of a billion foreskins or
| whatever, I would say please do not attempt even by implication
| to recruit my argument in support of your position.
| holowoodman wrote:
| I didn't say anything about a foreskin anywhere. And my point
| is, they did not just do minor stuff like a circumcision
| (which I think is a barbaric, pointless and immoral practice
| to inflict on non-consenting minors in any case except to
| maybe cure phimosis).
|
| They did major surgery. Like opening the cranium or abdomen.
| Like removing limbs. Like removing burnt skin by brushing it
| off and applying skin grafts. And no, they didn't even apply
| Lidocain, because children don't feel pain. At best, they
| gave muscle relaxants as chemical restraints and to make the
| tissue easier to cut.
| throwanem wrote:
| According to a social media influencer.
| watwut wrote:
| I really do not understand why did you felt the need to push
| for circumcisions here. Like, no one asked or discussed them
| one way or the other. Like ok, it is religious for Jews and
| Arabs, but no one else have to care.
| throwanem wrote:
| Who _pushed?_
|
| Jesus, I tried as hard as I knew how _not_ to start a
| fight, knowing this place plays host to a few foreskin
| mourners. Better just to avoid entirely, it appears, and
| duly noted.
|
| What a shame the eyeroll emoji is filtered here. That,
| apparently, is the level people are on. A _paragraph_ is
| too much! Or is everyone still rationing since Cerebral, or
| whatever that telemedicine pill mill was called, shut down
| a few years back? Is that why no one is reading today?
|
| I never thought I'd say this, but for God's sake and as a
| favor to us both, pipe my shit through ChatGPT and ask for
| a reframing on a sixth-grade reading level. You pay for
| access to the damned robot, let it wipe your nose through
| the remedial work. I've got embroidery to do and movies to
| watch.
| quantumwoke wrote:
| My wife is a doctor and looked into the history of this for a
| bit more context. Apparently, there were some cases in 1987
| where premature neonates were paralysed but not given general
| anaesthesia due to risk of immediate death. This led to a
| position statement from the paediatric society at the time that
| nobody should be operated on without pain relief / general
| anaesthetic.
|
| Note that this does not mean that general anaesthesia was not
| given at all to kids before 1987, but that there was a belief
| in the USA (and elsewhere) that newborns did not need pain
| relief during anaesthesia. Your use of 'kids' versus 'newborns'
| is a bit misleading in that respect.
| holowoodman wrote:
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S152659001.
| ..
|
| > textbooks at the time taught that [open heart] surgery
| [...] ''could be safely accomplished with only oxygen and a
| paralytic'' 69(p.580) when performed on infants.
|
| Textbooks isn't "some doctors errorneously believed", it is
| what most doctors believed, taught and practiced.
|
| > infant surgery routinely conducted with no or minimal
| anesthesia well into the 1980s
|
| "Routinely" isn't a few isolated cases, that's the word for
| "this is the usual thing to do".
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20608214/
|
| > The study by McGraw (1941), although badly designed,
| convinced the vast majority of clinicians that infants do not
| feel pain and do not require analgesia. This theory,
| reinforced by the fear of using opioids in young children,
| dominated medical thinking for more than 30 years.
|
| "Vast majority" and "dominated" also doesn't sound like just
| "some cases".
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/17/opinion/l-why-infant-
| surg...
|
| > surveys of medical professionals indicate that as recently
| as 1986 infants as old as 15 months were receiving no
| anesthesia during surgery at most American hospitals.
|
| We can discuss the definition of "kid" and "newborn", but I
| would no longer call them "newborn" when they start walking.
| Also "most American hospitals" means the practice was very
| widespread even in 1986.
|
| I think the whole situation is one of the medical community
| failing to recognize and admit their own mistakes. Instead,
| the obvious barbarism of the whole situation is played down,
| diminished and belittled. Thereby protecting their own
| feelings and standing at the cost of the victims' right to
| the truth. And thereby paving the way for a repetition of
| such gruesome mistakes. At which point I would argue, it
| might even be a little callousness or even intent...
| quantumwoke wrote:
| I think there is a definitional problem with "kids" vs
| "infants" vs "newborns" which are all difficult to define,
| the type of anaesthesia that was administered and we are
| also talking about 40 years ago. Our understanding of
| anaesthetics and heart surgery in newborns was much
| different than today. America definitely has a checkered
| and sordid past here and in psychiatry. But we also have a
| duty to be definitionally exact here which is why I tried
| to get a bit more context when the GP used the term "kids".
| I had thought before investigating that meant all the way
| up to teenagers.
| holowoodman wrote:
| I admit that "kids" is a bit imprecise and can lead to
| misunderstandings. But that is just not important to this
| discussion.
|
| And the exact definition of the anesthesia given to most
| infants before 1987: A paralytic. Nothing else.
|
| If you feel adventurous, have your family doctor give you
| a paralytic and then push a sterile needle under your
| fingernail. Then tell me the exact definition of
| sufficient anesthesia in that case ;)
| rscho wrote:
| > And the exact definition of the anesthesia given to
| most infants before 1987: A paralytic. Nothing else.
|
| To my knowledge, this was only true for newborns. Infants
| and up usually got some sort of hypnotic.
| serial_dev wrote:
| I don't know where the truth lies, but even if everything
| you wrote is true (and it does sound reasonable to me), not
| giving anesthesia might still be a safer choice considering
| the side effects. Not saying it is, only saying that we
| need to take a look at the side effects and risks, and all
| other (at a time) available information before we call them
| barbarians.
| holowoodman wrote:
| At some point in adult medicine, it was recognized that
| using an analgesic during surgery, in addition to the
| then normal combination of paralytic and hypnotic,
| significantly increased survival rates. This fact was
| independent of the patients capacity to remember the pain
| and wasn't any kind of psychological response like PTSD.
| It was the basal reaction to injury and pain by stress
| that killed those patients.
|
| The exact same reaction kills non-adults. The proof took
| longer, but it is there now. That doctors even needed
| proof instead of, without further experimental knowledge,
| assuming the null hypothesis of children being small
| adults in this case already is proof of a kind of
| chauvinistic barbarism. Infants were some kind of lesser
| human to them, thus couldn't react in the same way as
| adults.
|
| Remember, the norm was _no_ analgesia, _no_ pain relief.
| For the majority of infants. Its not that they decided on
| a case by case basis on the right balance of analgesia
| vs. risk. They decided as a matter of course that
| analgesia was superfluous for infants.
| rscho wrote:
| While the theory about pain in kids was certainly wrong,
| you are lacking some context about what 'safe' used to
| mean, and what it means nowadays. In the 80's, kids were
| under halothane and long-acting paralysis drugs which,
| especially in cardiac patients, are really dangerous.
| Halothane is now discontinued, as are many other common
| drugs from this time. Theories do not spring out in
| isolation. The evolution of technology, biological
| understanding and new pharmacology have all contributed to
| allow new opinions as incremental changes made old theories
| more and more evidently obsolete. Doctors 50 years from now
| will also wonder how we could be so stupid in 2025.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| This right here. Medicine is not bad in general. Mother Nature
| is a wicked mistress. Pain and suffering are her defaults, and
| glimmers of happiness fleeting.
|
| Modern technology and medicine in particular have made our
| lives better and longer in ways our near ancestors could not
| have dreamed of or hoped for.
|
| It's not hard to find counterexamples of course: opioid
| addiction, climate change, etc. But on balance we're a hellava
| lot better off now than 50 or 500 years ago.
|
| Nice to use a bit less anesthesia for faster/better recovery
| and money savings. But for goodness sake - let's not go TOO far
| down that path.
| thelaxiankey2 wrote:
| Do notice that the comments about 'pain and suffering are
| mother nature's defaults' have very little to do with
| anything else you said, or with the discussion more broadly.
| I think these sorts of things are bad internet hygiene and
| promote an actively depressive state of mind. They can be
| memetic concepts, and should be treated with care. If you do
| actually feel this way about your own life, I'd encourage you
| to seek some kind of help. And besides, there's nothing
| natural about surgery...
|
| I think the rest of what you're saying is fairly accurate,
| though.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| Compare that with the whole "twilight sleep" way of delivering
| babies and you can see a whole misogynistic thread of not
| respecting natural systems and of trying to minimize or
| eliminate the behavioral symptoms of pain while doing little to
| actually ease the patient.
| rscho wrote:
| > I fear the general trend of "medication bad" will get us back
| to those dark times.
|
| I think this won't ever happen. Modern docs would absolutely
| not accept working under such conditions. Anesthesia is not
| only comfort for the patient, but also for care providers. As
| you can often see when surgeons advise patients on refusing
| local anesthesia or nurses demanding benzos for the screaming
| demented patient at 2 a.m.
| tzs wrote:
| Another medical horror story that only ended way more recently
| than it should have (mid 1950's probably):
| https://www.straightdope.com/21341781/in-medicine-what-s-the...
| crazygringo wrote:
| Why is this about kids?
|
| Do we already measure EEG for adults? Or not? If we do, why has
| it taken so long to do with kids? If not, is this a first step?
| Why start with kids rather than adults?
|
| This article provides shockingly little context.
| quantumwoke wrote:
| My wife is a doctor and provided me (layperson) the following
| context. Apparently EEG is now used in most adult surgeries and
| has been increasing over time. It is used as a marker of how
| 'asleep' you are to guide how much medication you get. However,
| this is relatively recent and the use of EEG in kids (where the
| brainwaves are different) was not studied/used as much. It
| seems like this study pushes towards a future where EEGs are
| routine in most if not all surgeries to make them safer -
| especially as the next generation of anaesthetists are trained
| in it.
| bts327 wrote:
| I'm good here. Thanks.
| quantumwoke wrote:
| It obviously varies on place of practice and the way you
| were taught. My understanding is the evidence is pretty
| clear that it helps but happy to defer to your lived
| experience.
| holowoodman wrote:
| MAC doesn't indicate the depth of the anesthesia. It
| indicates the depth of the paralysis. Which is exactly the
| problem EEG monitoring is supposed to prevent: In some
| cases patients can have an insufficient response to
| analgesia (so they will feel pain) and hypnotics (so they
| are awake, aware and forming memories) but will respond to
| paralytics (so they are unable to move and communicate
| their predicament).
|
| So with this kind of practice, you create any patient's
| worst nightmare: being cut open, feeling everything,
| knowing everything, but unable to stop it. And you are
| unknowing, uncaring or too cheap to prevent that e.g. via
| EEG monitoring.
|
| Edit: Parent removed his comment. Roughly, from memory,
| there was some claim by him about being a professional
| anesthetist, having very rarely encountered EEG and only
| bi-spectral index monitoring (an EEG-derived computed
| measurement) in some IV cases, some claims about the
| unreliability of both and about the preference for MAC
| (minimum alveolar concentration) to monitor depth of
| anesthesia.
| bts327 wrote:
| Good day to you.
| holowoodman wrote:
| Well... My textbook[0] says:
|
| > The minimum alveolar concentration (MAC) is the minimum
| concentration of an inhaled anesthetic at 1 atm of
| pressure that prevents skeletal muscle movement in
| response to a surgical incision in 50% of patients.
|
| So first, you do not measure the depth of anesthesia, you
| measure the concentration of the anesthetic. Second, you
| judge this concentration by the prevention of muscle
| movement. Called _paralysis_.
|
| Please tell me you are not really a doctor.
|
| [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-
| dentistry/...
|
| Edit: In case you are wondering why this response doesn't
| really fit the parent comment, the parent saw fit to
| completely replace his comment without an indication that
| he did so. Originally there was a claim in the parent
| comment about "MAC being the primary indication of
| anesthetic depth being the textbook definition" or
| something to that effect. To which I responded. I guess I
| must have hit a nerve there ;)
| rscho wrote:
| "MAC being the primary indication of anesthetic depth
| being the textbook definition"
|
| I am an attending anesthesiologist and this is true. MAC
| cannot be interpreted at face value, though. You've got
| other drugs on board (not accounted for in MAC), the
| patient might be frail or very old, etc. etc. All things
| changing MAC interpretation, which is why there are still
| anesthesia providers instead of robots ;-) We currently
| have no way of faithfully measuring the depth of
| anesthesia, and our understanding of
| consciousness/awareness is incomplete. Anesthesiologists
| have to rely mostly on know-how, even in 2025.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| >Robotic Anesthesia: A Vision for 2050
|
| https://journals.lww.com/anesthesia-
| analgesia/fulltext/2024/...
| bookofjoe wrote:
| >Anesthesia Awareness and the Bispectral Index (2008)
|
| https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa0707361
|
| ........................................
|
| >Awareness during anesthesia: how sure can we be that the
| patient is sleeping indeed? (2009)
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2683150/
|
| ........................................
|
| >Awake Under Anesthesia (2018)
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/are-we-all-
| awake...
|
| https://archive.ph/t9T7o
|
| ........................................ >Single-trial
| classification of awareness state during anesthesia by
| measuring critical dynamics of global brain activity
| (2019)
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-41345-4
|
| ........................................
|
| >Intraoperative and Anesthesia Awareness (2023)
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK582138/
| rscho wrote:
| MAC is the alveolar concentration (so strictly speaking
| defined only for anesthetic gases) at which half of
| people show no motor reaction on surgical incision. I
| understand your interpretation about paralysis, but we
| know the measurement endpoint is not paralysis in
| practice. Gases are hypnotics, and although they do cause
| some amount of muscle relaxation they do not induce
| paralysis. Hence the need for other drugs when we need
| paralysis. BTW, there is evidence that EEG prevents
| awareness under anesthesia, but it's not a guarantee
| either. Fortunately, awareness is extremely rare even in
| the select cases where it occurs more often (emergency
| C-section and cardiac surgery, especially in seniors).
| mschuster91 wrote:
| What about people who routinely use drugs in heavier
| concentrations or who have higher tolerance from genetics?
| How is that detected?
| rscho wrote:
| You just crank it up until those people don't react. With
| experience, you can anticipate those pretty well.
| bagels wrote:
| Doctors not too long ago would tell you that infants don't
| experience pain.
|
| There are a lot of not backed by science beliefs in the medical
| field that won't die until the doctors that believe them do.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23548489/
| Hydraulix989 wrote:
| An example is that thin people cannot possibly have sleep
| apnea, it only affects overweight people. Overly-confident
| Dunning-Kruger doctors adamantly declared this as "truth" to
| me enough times that it stalled me getting properly treated
| at least a decade.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| 'A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its
| opponents and making them see the light, but rather because
| its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up
| that is familiar with it.' -- Max Planck
| baxtr wrote:
| Too much protein is bad for your kidneys!!!
|
| PS: this has been debunked, still docs keep saying it.
| leereeves wrote:
| I've heard there is good evidence that weightlifters eating
| an appropriate (high) protein intake for hypertrophy don't
| harm healthy kidneys, though the sources seemed biased.
|
| But has that statement been debunked for sedentary people
| or people with kidney disease?
| baxtr wrote:
| https://physiqonomics.com/are-high-protein-diets-bad-for-
| you...
|
| Had a great overview.
|
| _> As long as you have don't have pre-existing kidney
| issues, you don't need to worry about high-protein
| intakes killing your kidneys, and it's time to put this
| myth to bed._
| rscho wrote:
| We do it regularly in both kids and adults, and this is nothing
| new. It's just that a study confirms it's useful using
| statistics instead of common sense. We were already using EEG
| in both kids and adults 15 years ago.
| Nezghul wrote:
| What is the level of unconsciousness during anesthesia? Is it
| "sleep-like" unconsciousness or "neurons do basically nothing"
| level? Whenever I read about anesthesia I am wondering if we are
| not accidentally killing people (and creating new ones) like in
| teletransportation paradox.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox
| accrual wrote:
| Just anecdata, but I was under a few times as kid. It was like
| teleporting into the future. Last memory was being told to
| count backwards, next memory was waking up in the recovery
| room.
|
| Apparently I had a small anesthetic overdose in the hospital as
| a kid and woke up a day or two later than expected, but from my
| perspective, nothing happened and I just went to sleep then
| woke up.
| holowoodman wrote:
| Depends on the "kind" of anesthesia, on the medication used and
| on the specific reaction of the patient to that medication.
|
| For example there is stuff like Ketamine, which in some cases
| can live up to its other use as a recreational drug and give
| the patient very colorful dreams. There are sedatives that just
| take away the capacity to form memories, but leave you awake
| and aware, just calmer. In cases like some knee surgeries, it
| is possible to leave the patient fully awake, just paralyze and
| numb the legs.
| tzs wrote:
| To add to the examples others have given there is also some
| that makes you not feel pain but you do remain semi-conscious
| and when so can still form permanent memories. This is called
| conscious sedation. They can adjust your level of consciousness
| as they go, so they can make you more aware if they have to ask
| questions or need to you do something like move a body part for
| them and make you less aware when they don't need any
| interaction.
|
| It combines a sedative from the benzodiazepine family with a
| synthetic opioid painkiller. This is the most common sedation
| for colonoscopies. I had a colonoscopy using this, with
| fentanyl as the opioid and probably midazolam for the
| benzodiazepine (if not that probably diazepam).
|
| I was aware of the doctor starting the procedure and felt
| something cold. I could feel pushing sometimes. But nothing
| hurt or was even annoying (except that cold right at the
| start). I remember being asked how I was doing and answering. I
| remember the doctor talking about the quality of my prep--the
| laxatives had not been as effective as they could have been--
| and noting that it was still good enough to allow them to
| continue.
|
| There are some gaps so I think at some points I was more out of
| it.
|
| I had an earlier colonoscopy with deep sedation using propofol.
| Here's the experience with that: (1) they start it and I have
| maybe 10 seconds of memories after that point. At this point I
| wasn't even in the procedure room. I was in a bed in a waiting
| area. (2) My next memory is waking up, in the same waiting
| area, with a nurse telling me they are done, putting the basket
| with my pants and glasses and phone on the bed, and telling me
| I could put my pants on.
|
| I've got no memory of being wheeled into the procedure area, or
| of anything that happened there, or being wheeled back.
|
| That doesn't necessarily mean I didn't feel anything during the
| procedure. When we were going over the sedation options when
| arranging for that colonoscopy I asked if deep sedation means
| you don't feel anything at all, and all the doctor would say is
| that I would not have any memories of anything.
|
| That isn't exactly reassuring.
|
| If someone offered to pay me a large amount of money to undergo
| a couple of hours or horrible torture with a guarantee that
| they would give me a drug to prevent forming long term memories
| of that torture I would not accept. I would be too worried that
| there could be other negative persistent effects of such mental
| trauma than just the formation of long term recallable memories
| and that the memory preventing drug would not stop those other
| effect.
| siavosh wrote:
| Any relation to integrated information theory (IIT, Koch et al)?
| HocusLocus wrote:
| Why is there a sense that kids simply "don't remember" the pain
| of surgery if they are lightly anesthetized?
|
| Do they think the nervous system is "turned off" in kids and
| "turns on" later? Likewise with the formation of memories. A
| human consciousness that is dealt searing pain under paralysis
| for an eon of thought-time, might trigger a life long psychosis
| that impairs living and learning.
|
| Or a thirst for revenge.
| rscho wrote:
| The theory wasn't about remembering, it was mostly about babies
| supposedly having a nervous system too immature to interpret
| pain as in adults. This is not the current opinion at all
| anymore.
| holowoodman wrote:
| You are correct. But there is also the aspect that in current
| opinion, children below the age of 2 to 3 years do not form
| episodic memory. Which can reinforce the misconception about
| the necessity of anesthetics in children, because they are
| unable to recall and tell about the pain.
| rscho wrote:
| Anesthesia is mostly know-how. When you've put several
| hundred kids under, you (usually) become equipped with a
| good sense of what's going on, even without kids telling
| you.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| I used to work in this field decades ago. It was relatively
| straightforward. You could see it with your plain eyes in the
| EEG, but also you could calculate metrics from it. One really fun
| way was to listen to the sped up EEG signal when a person is put
| into anesthesia. It sounded like you went underwater.
|
| The key thing is that when people are given muscle relaxants, you
| need an independent method to measure consciousness directly.
|
| I haven't followed this in decades so it's a total surprise to me
| if it isn't mainstream yet.
|
| You could buy a module for your anesthesia monitor for this, no
| need to use a separate device.
| rscho wrote:
| It is mainstream. We have modules. It's useful, but
| unfortunately not a magic wand either.
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