When We Go Under, Where Do We Go? Molecules, Medicine, and the Mind

Catalog description

Each year, tens of millions of people are rendered unconscious on purpose. General anesthesia, a controlled and reversible suspension of consciousness, is one of medicine's most profound and least understood achievements: we can reliably switch awareness off and on, yet we still don't fully know why it works. This seminar traces the anesthetic state across scales, from molecular logic to the whole patient. We begin with how anesthetic ligands modulate neuronal receptors and quiet the brain, then move outward to the body under anesthesia, asking how the heart, lungs, and kidneys are kept stable once the autonomic safeguards that normally protect us are suspended. Bridging laboratory science and clinical reality, students will engage with real physiological data and observe the "switch" firsthand through supervised shadowing in Stanford operating rooms. You'll learn to read the brain's electrical rhythms (EEG) to track consciousness in real time, debate the ethics of switching off awareness, and hear from clinicians who do this every day, before stepping into the OR yourself to witness the moment of transition. Along the way, we examine the frontier - predictive physiology and artificial intelligence in the operating room - and confront the deep questions raised by the ability to temporarily turn a human being off: What happens to the self under anesthesia? Where, in any meaningful sense, do we go? Whether you are interested in chemistry, philosophy, or clinical medicine, you will leave this seminar with a unique intuition for how tiny molecules control the complex, elusive phenomena of human life.