The Quest for Unconsciousness: A Brief History of Anesthesia

Although being asleep and being unconscious might look the same, they are very different states. Until the mid-19th century, a medically induced deep unconsciousness was beyond the reach of science. Healers had no reliable way to control, let alone eliminate, a patient’s awareness or pain during surgery, though not for lack of trying.

 Why Are Pelvic Exams on Unconscious, Unconsenting Women Still Part of Medical Training?

We understand consent better than ever. So why haven’t we ended this practice?

The Unconscious Mind

Although Sigmund Freud was not the sole discoverer of the unconscious mind, he is given a majority of the credit for bringing this theory into the mainstream. Freud believed that there were underlying levels of the mind beneath the conscious one, and it is these hidden levels that dictate much of the behavior of an individual, especially the abnormal behavior: Freud’s main area of interest.

What’s unconscious bias training, and does it work?

The novelty of unconscious bias training means there is little direct evidence about whether it works. To determine its potential, researchers have turned to clues from other types of training.

Awake or Knocked Out? The Line Gets Blurrier

The puzzle of consciousness is so devilish that scientists and philosophers are still struggling with how to talk about it, let alone figure out what it is and where it comes from.

How One Brain Came Back From Unconsciousness

Despite its encircling fortress of bone, the human brain is especially vulnerable to physical insult. There are approximately 1.7 million traumatic brain injuries in the United States each year, and although most of them are mild or moderate, thousands result in severe brain damage. Those injuries always happen on the same day: day zero, a day that marks the start of a fateful and often flawed prognostic calendar.

Society is Unconscious

It was Sigmund Freud who created a structural approach about how the unconscious mind works. The unconscious acts like a container for all of our primitive wishes and impulses; for Freud, he found that for some of his patients their experiences of certain events were so traumatic that they repressed them to the point that they became unconscious. Now, the main point for this article is that Freud also states that these issues, losses, or trauma’s find other ways to re-emerge.

The Power of the Unconscious

There’s a part of our unconscious that can serve us well. We can refer to it as our wisdom. It is all that knowledge we naturally possess that can be a wonderful tool to navigate life.

The Unconscious Mind: A Great Decision Maker

The research not only backs up the common advice to "sleep on it" when facing difficult choices, but it also suggests that the unconscious brain can actively reason as well as produce weird dreams and Freudian slips.