Processing our mortality

[bennyboy]

I had open-heart surgery in 2001 and was deeply anaesthetized. Nine hours passed, but to me it was seconds. In some sense 'I' was suppressed for that time. That gave me a better grasp of what it's like to be dead. It's like nothing at all. Never another thought, just off like a light bulb unscrewed and dropped on pavement, no coming back on. I still have a normal fear of dying, but am utterly unafraid of being dead. I won't be around for that part.

Here's a super-scary thought.

I don't know if the jury's in or out on this, but I heard something disturbing way back when i was in college.  After some research, they found that it seemed people WERE conscious during surgery under anaesthetization, but that due to effects of the drug on memory, they couldn't recall the event later.

That kind of goes back to the comments about memory in my last post-- just because you don't remember something doesn't mean there wasn't something.  Sometimes I have a vague sense that there is a kind of minimal awareness even in deep sleep, but the sensation of it evaporates on waking up, because it doesn't engage those parts of the brain involved in memory at all.

--edit--
Here's a random article that google popped up when I searched for this just now:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2683150/