Jad Abumrad

But it's still almost a philosophical kind of mystery.

It's called a black box.

It refers to a system where you can see what goes in.

You can see that something different comes out.

And you wonder, like, what happened there in the middle?

But you can't see it.

Yeah.

It's a mystery.

It's black, and it's closed up, therefore the box.

I mean, it may not literally be a box, but today we have three different attempts to open three very different black boxes.

Starting with the box that's in front of us now, that gap that Carl talked about where you go, boom.

You're gone.

And then, suddenly you're back.

What happens in that gap?

That's what's crazy.

It's been almost 170 years since William Morton did his thing in front of those med students, and we've moved way beyond ether.

So here we've got propofol, we've got sevoflurane, dexmedetomidine, ketamine.

We've got all these new drugs, but we still don't know exactly how they work.

which for Patrick is a very practical problem.

It's very difficult actually to figure out when people aren't conscious because they can always be internally conscious to some degree, right?