We still don’t know how general anaesthesia works, but it’s teaching us about consciousness

Unveiling Consciousness🧠

Here’s something wild: we still don’t know how general anaesthesia works. Let me say it again. The science that lets someone slice open your body while you lay there feeling nothing, knowing nothing, teetering on the edge of unconsciousness? Mystery. We’ve been putting people under for over a century, yet the full mechanics of it remain elusive. But here’s where things get even deeper. Research into anaesthesia is starting to give us clues about consciousness itself, what it means to be “awake,” aware, alive. And that has implications far beyond the operating room.

For Black folks, the story of anaesthesia is a lesson in how systems fail when they treat us like afterthoughts. Medicine, like most things in this country, wasn’t built with us in mind. In fact, it was often built on us, on our stolen bodies and unpaid pain. Remember, the “Father of Modern Gynecology,” J. Marion Sims, perfected his techniques by experimenting on enslaved Black women, awake and writhing. No numbing agents. No consent. ” That history doesn’t just live in the past, it echoes every time someone dismisses our pain, ignores our symptoms, or treats us like guinea pigs. The Tuskegee experiment wasn’t some anomaly; it was the system doing exactly what it was designed to do.

And even now, Black folks are still less likely to receive adequate anaesthesia or pain relief in medical settings. That’s not anecdotal. That’s documented. Studies show we’re perceived as having “higher pain tolerance” because of racist pseudoscience that painted us as superhuman (or subhuman, depending on what white supremacy needed that day). When anaesthesia fails, when we wake up during surgery or feel the sting of what’s supposed to be numbed, our complaints are less likely to be believed.

Remember, the “Father of Modern Gynecology,” J. Marion Sims, perfected his techniques by experimenting on enslaved Black women, awake and writhing. No numbing agents. No consent. Just suffering in the name of “progress.”

And for many, the operating table isn’t just a place where bodies are stitched up; it’s a battleground where dignity and humanity are constantly under threat.

But if anaesthesia is teaching us about consciousness, then Black consciousness has something to teach the world about survival. Because let’s be real: we’ve been navigating altered states forever. From the visionary experiences of our ancestors, driven by ritual and spirituality, to the dissociation that comes with generational trauma, we’ve learned to operate in spaces where the mind splits from the body. We’ve had to. When your physical self is constantly under siege, from slavery to police brutality to medical racism, sometimes the only way to endure is to retreat inward. To find refuge in the parts of yourself that no scalpel, no bullet, no shackles can touch. Black consciousness isn’t just a state of being; it’s an act of resistance.

And here’s the “so what”: if we still don’t fully understand how anaesthesia works, maybe it’s time to push harder on all the things we’ve learned not to question. Like, why do we trust systems that have never centered us to suddenly care about our well-being? Why do we accept the patchwork fixes, another study here, another panel discussion there, when the foundation itself is rotten? Anaesthesia is a tool, yes, but it’s also a metaphor for how these systems operate. They numb us just enough to keep us quiet, to keep us from feeling the full weight of the harm. But the harm doesn’t go away. It just gets buried.

There’s a lot we don’t know about consciousness. But Black folks have always understood this much: awareness is power. Feeling the pain, naming it, refusing to let it get buried under someone else’s convenience, that’s how we stay alive. That’s how we heal. And that’s how we keep pushing, until the systems that fail us either change or crumble. Either way, we won’t sleep through it. ✊🏾