Anesthesiologists discover a third state of consciousness

During surgical interventions under anesthesia, doctors have detected something surprising.

Neuroscience studies human behavior based on cold, impersonal from cold, impersonal data, relatively easy to analyze quantitatively. However, there is one aspect of psychology that cannot be measured directly: subjective states of consciousness. Perhaps that is why scientists have difficulty in constructing a definition of what consciousness is, what its nature is, and what exactly it is based on.

Hence, the discoveries that are being made about the functioning of the brain make the distinction between two states of subjectivity ("conscious" and "unconscious") shaky. There are now indications that a third state of consciousness may exist. there could be a third state of consciousness which has been dubbed dysanaesthesia (dysanaesthesia).

Partial consciousness in the operating room

The discovery of this possible third state of consciousness is related to the usual practice of anesthesiologists: putting people to sleep.

The experiment consisted of asking people apparently unconscious due to the effect of general anesthesia to move the fingers of a hand that had been isolated from the rest of the body by a tourniquet while being operated on. Interestingly, almost two-quarters of the anesthetized persons obeyed the order as requested, despite the fact that, according to the anesthesiologists' systems, they were not able to do so.The anesthetized individuals obeyed the command as instructed, even though the electronic monitoring systems told them they should have been fully asleep. On the other hand, the doses of anesthesia given were the normal ones, those that would have been given in any normal operation.

None of the people who participated in the experiment moved their hand for anything other than following the commands they were given, nor did they appear to respond in any way to the surgery they were undergoing. Moreover, once awake, only two of them had a vague recollection of moving their handand neither remembered anything about the surgery nor claimed to have felt pain.

The third state of consciousness appears to be based on something akin to selective attention.

Dysanesthesia, or how to expand the repertoire of mental states.

The fact that some patients are able to move a part of their body in response to commands could be taken as a sign of consciousness in the operating room, something that can be solved by increasing the dose of anesthesia. However, some anesthesiologists, such as Dr. Jaideep Pandit believes that these patients are in a third state of consciousness that is not comparable to what you are experiencing as you read these lines, nor to what occurs when sleeping without dreams.

This could be so because during this "dysanesthesia" there is some automatic process that is in charge of discerning what are commands directed towards the sleeper from what are notand therefore makes it possible to react only in some cases and not in others (even if these others have to do with metal instruments cutting skin and flesh).

A third state of consciousness is also an uncomfortable idea.

This third state of consciousness would therefore be only partial. However, this experiment also exposes the technology currently used to monitor the consciousness of the operating room patient. Apparently, the markers monitored so far have limited predictive power, and that means that during the operation under general anesthesia many things could be happening in the patient's consciousness that are not recorded by the machines and that remain in the privacy of one's own subjectivity, even though no memories are stored afterwards.

In the end, this experiment is a reminder that it is complicated to talk about consciousness when one does not know very well what it is. Is it possible to define something that is entirely subjective? What if there are types of consciousness that cannot be distinguished by machines? It is possible that dysanesthesia is a third state of consciousness, but it may also head a long list of mental states that have yet to be discovered.

Bibliographical references:

• Pandit, J. J. (2013). Isolated forearm - or isolated brain? Interpreting responses during anaesthesia – or ‘dysanaesthesia’. Anaesthesia, 68(10), pp. 995 - 1000.
• Russell I. F. (2013). The ability of bispectral index to detect intra-operative wakefulness during isoflurane/air anaesthesia, compared with the isolated forearm technique. Anaesthesia, 68(10): 1010 - 1020.