While the article does not detail what those advances in the understanding of consciousness are, my guess is that they relate to functional brain imaging of conscious mental activity. Nevertheless, I doubt that we will see surgeons obtaining PET scans or fMRIs of patients under general anaesthesia on the operating room gurney anytime soon. Consciousness researchers and surgeons couldn’t be further apart in the medical realm, methinks…

Some procedures are done under ‘conscious sedation,’ either because they are painfree or because they can be done with regional anaesthesia such as a nerve block. In some neurosurgical procedures, it is necessary that the patient be able to carry out actions on command to make sure that the surgeons are not messing about with the wrong parts of the brain.

But to be immobilized, conscious and feeling the pain of the surgical incisions would be the ultimate torture, to my mind. I have never seen or heard an interview with a patient who has been through that, but thinking about it inspires the kind of visceral horror that I imagine motivated those who fought for the abolition of vivisection.