Effects of Propofol

Factual Questions
21

Sure, but the interesting part is that I suspect with these amnesiac drugs, it’s TOTALLY in the moment.

As in, it hurts like hell for a fraction of a second, and then when it’s gone, you don’t even remember it having hurt immediately before.

One way to think about it is that “us” and even our immediate perceptions are strongly linked to memory, however short-term.

Cut off that memory link, and it may as well have not happened.

Here’s an example- if you wake up at 7 am with a headache, do you know or care if that headache started at 5 am or 6 am? Probably not, as you were unconscious and have no memory of that headache until you woke up at 7 am.

Same kind of thing for these amnesiac drugs; you just flat out don’t record the memory of the pain, so it may as well have not existed from your perspective. It’s not much different in theory than blocking the transmission of the brai.

Another example might be if you had a surveillance camera pointed at your backyard shed and hooked up to a recorder of some sort. Regular anesthetic is more or less like turning off the whole system, so that nothing is recorded. Amnesia producing sedatives are more like turning off the recorder or maybe disconnecting the cable so that even though the camera’s working, nothing’s recorded.

Either way, when you come in the next morning, you don’t know that someone tried to break into your shed at 3 am. All you’re left with is the physical evidence- gouge marks, dents, etc… but not the video evidence of some knucklehead beating it with a crowbar or something like that.

22

I could swear we had a similar discussion a few months ago, but I can’t run a search at the moment. I think Spice Weasel said some interesting things about memory in that thread.

I sure do, because if I’m feeling pain while dreaming, it gets amplified in my dream and I usually end up dreaming that I’m being tortured. Very unpleasant. It’s a big relief to wake up and find out that the guy sawing through my leg was actually just the cat lying on me and pressing his bony legs into my shin.

23

“Einmal ist keinmal…” or “Once doesn’t matter,” I guess is the way I look at it. We’ve all taken our bumps and lumps, and they suck at the time, but when the wounds are healed, they don’t reallly matter anymore (until that 20 year old injury rears its ugly head again). The permanent GiantRat doesn’t have any real awareness of what SleepyRat experienced, other than the fact that he was carved up. I much prefer that over having the real GiantRat having a vivid recollection of a terrible experience.

24

That’s all very nice for your long term psychological well-being. But if you’re facing some considerable pain now, and they’re saying “well this won’t help you much for the pain now, but you won’t remember it afterwards”, that doesn’t seem like much comfort.

I suspect that people being sanguine about it has a lot to do with people’s general tendency to over-rely on their memories. Anything that they have no recall of feels like it never really happened at all.

25

Hence the point that it’s administered before inflicting the necessary pain of whatever the docs are doing to you. If you’re already injured and having pain then other analgesics are typically part of the equation.

In general I support, as I said above, the idea that lack of conscious memory is as good as it never happening.

But IMO it’s appropriate to insert an almost in there. Clearly there are many aspects of our adult personalities that have their origins in childhood experiences we don’t recall. Many phobias start that way. As does our general attitude towards trust or distrust of family and of strangers.

Enough severe pain over enough time, even if never remembered consciously, might have an effect on personality. IOW, imagine some diabolical character administering propofol to a victim, torturing them for hours in a way that does no real lasting damage but hurts like hell, then doing this daily for a year. What might the results be?

Based on our decidedly sketchy ideas about how the brain / mind really works, it probably all depends on how far up/down the abstraction stack propofol’s cut-out works.

If the victim is having fully formed thoughts and experiences but just not storing them there might well be consequential “echoes” and vague stimulus response actions getting stored at the lower levels of the psyche. Which would go on to affect their day-to-day behavior even if the victim has no idea why or how.

OTOH, if the victim’s brain / mind processes are cut off at a lower level so we’re just seeing reflex actions like flinching, recoiling, & crying out but they’re having no real-time experience at all, we’d expect that to leave *no *“echoes” or vague stimulus response actions at the lower levels of the psyche. Since those lower levels also never “experienced” the noxious stimulus. And hence could not affect day-to-day behavior later.

Which of the above is closer to the truth? I have no clue. It may vary by individual. It certainly varies by medication. And the consequences for people only exposed to it a couple times in their lives would be much different from the childhood trust or ongoing propofol torture scenarios. It takes a lot of grains of sand to add up to a personality change. One or two grains, even if large, are almost certainly just noise.

26

Wasn’t there a serial killer who did something similar to this to some of the victims he didn’t kill? In New Mexico, I think?