OK. I read Cecil’s answer regarding Nitrous Oxide (laughing gas, the stuff Dentist’s use), but he only went so far as to explain what it is and possibly how it works. What I want to know is the odd sensation you get when the room starts spinning. This never happens when I fall asleep at night and I’ve been knocked out before for tooth extractions and never experienced it. But recently I had a lot of dental work and used Nitrous Oxide. At first, there was a feeling of relaxation, then after about 10 minutes or so, even if I tried to avoid it and fight the feeling the room started spinning around. AND, it always spins clockwise, never the other way around. My question is, why does this happen?
Nice try…but that can’t be the answer. Think about it. What does the rotation of the earth have to do with you sitting in a chair in New Jersey? Yeah, maybe if you were sitting on the North Pole or something, but c’mon. There is absolutely no way that you could feel the effects of the movement of the Earth on the “side” of the sphere. Consider a dimple on a golf ball, for example. The dimple at the pivot point seems as if it is moving round and round, but a dimple on the side, say at the point of New Jersey, would just feel (if it were possible) that it was going in one direction. Consider the Sun rising and falling for example #2.
what i always found interesting about nitrous was the sound of the flourescent lights. As the buzz fades in, the hum of the lights gets so ungodly loud. And when theres not a flourescent light in the room, you manage to hear the light in an office building a half a block away… :-).
-Luckie
“for our old cause keeps us together,
and our hatred is so precious not death or defeat can break it”
-John Gould Fletcher
All I can say is that after a few bongs, there’s nothin’ like a good ol’ lungful of NO2… the spinning sensation is very obvious (though which way, I never noticed) but mostly the experience is centred in the face, warming and tingling at the same time. Mmmmmm… ahhhh, the joys of youth.
Nitrous appears to have many effects, but two of the primary ones are: loss of balance (the room spinning effect) and auditory sensitivity (the flourescent light effect). Both are well documented in the above testimonials. (and by personal experience). Since both of these senses originate in the ear, and IIRC both of these signals travel down the same nerve, perhaps nitrous effects are profoundly felt where this nerve synapses with the brain…
No one really knows how exactly volatile anesthetics work. The theory is that they incorporate themselves into the lipid membrane of cells thus interfering with normal function.
