Regaining Consciousness After General Anesthesia: a Personal Experience
Regaining Consciousness After General Anesthesia: a Personal Experience
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Date
2025-04
Authors
Elzubeir Beshir Taha
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Publisher
Napata College
Abstract
In 2015 I underwent heart surgery under general anesthesia. Just before I regained full
consciousness, I felt I was like a huge spaceship or something anchoring with bolts and nuts to a
huge kind of steel base structure. I discovered later that similar experiences in similar
circumstances were reported in relevant studies. In similar circumstances patients often describe
sensations of floating, heaviness, being "reassembled”, feeling like machines or parts of systems
or divine perception and awareness. Evidently the interpretation of these narratives depends on
the theoretical framework of one or the other of a variety of theories of consciousness.
In this paper an attempt is made to explain this subjective spaceship anchorage mental experience
within the theoretical framework of each of these constructs of consciousness. namely; Global
Workspace Theory (GWT), Predictive Coding (PC), Integrated Information theory (IIT), Higher
Order theories (HOT), and Penrose – Hammeroff Quantum Paradigm (Orch-Or).
Description
Case study