Slashdot Mirror
Drugged Honeybees Do the Time Warp
sciencehabit writes "Waking up from surgery can be disorienting. One minute you're in an operating room counting backwards from 10, the next you're in the recovery ward sans appendix, tonsils, or wisdom teeth. And unlike getting up from a good night's sleep, where you know that you've been out for hours, waking from anesthesia feels like hardly any time has passed. Now, thanks to the humble honeybee, scientists are starting to understand this sense of time loss. New research shows that general anesthetics disrupt the social insect's circadian rhythm, or internal clock, delaying the onset of timed behaviors such as foraging and mucking up their sense of direction."
Damn, was expecting something quite different from the title.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
... was whether or not the clock returned to normal over time. Could a 3 hour surgery cause long-term insomnia?
I did all of mine on locals. The uppers came out easily when I was in college in the seventies. I played softball later that afternoon. About ten years later I had the lowers extracted. These were full bony impacted that required something resembling a cross between vice grips and a slide hammer to remove. Dr. Armel did an excellent job and I learned that you can sleep standing up while on Percodan and Valium. Not as exciting as thinking I'm enrolled in Hogwarts and carrying an invisible light saber but it was still impressive pharmacopeia..
I swear man!
If I see any bees dressed in curly wigs, lingerie, fishnets and heels, I'm SO outta here!
I refuse to be caught LIKE THIS!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
AFAIK the problem mostly isn't the size of the jaw but the position of the teeth: They more often than not come out diagonally, and thus pushing out the other teeth while growing. You can see that under x rays while they are still completely inside the jaw bone.
My disorientation is that I didn't "wake up" after my knee surgery so much as "get shaken until I threw up" followed by demands that I vacate the premises for the next person. The surgery ran over time due to a routine complication, and the conveyor-belt outpatient hospital didn't have enough recovery beds for me to wake naturally from the extended anesthesia. In the end, they wheeled me into the parking lot, vomiting the whole time.
Learn to love Alaska
My anecdote would be one time I nodded off for a nap, and woke to orange light outside my window, my watch indicating around 7 o'clock. I suddenly 'realized' I'd overslept and leapt from my bed in a frenzy trying to get ready for work, I rushed into the kitchen going "I'm late!"..... when my stunned S/O pointed out that it's "7 pee em" and my sense of time started to return, I had to completely re-orient myself. I looked down and foolishly realised I was already dressed, and she was making dinner, not breakfast.
I don't think we really are able to track time when asleep, we just assume when we wake up it must be morning because we've been doing it all our lives. At least, that's what happened to me that time.
> no, yes, maybe (tagging beta)