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."

What they didn't delve into..

[Metabolife]

... was whether or not the clock returned to normal over time. Could a 3 hour surgery cause long-term insomnia?

Re:What they didn't delve into..

[Anonymous Coward]

Circadian rhythms are phase-locked loops, driven (at least mostly, and in humans -- dunno about bees) by blue light (which sunlight has plenty of and wood fires, lamps, and candles don't), so if you're in an environment where it wouldn't resync after anesthesia, you're probably already in free-run (~25h cycles) and thus (if you don't live on Mars) experiencing at least mild insomnia. Try melatonin supplements, turning off lights, especially fluorescent, LED, or other high-CCT lights, in the evenings, and/or re-calibrating your monitor to a lower CCT if you use a computer much shortly before bedtime.

Anesthesia stories

[AK Marc]

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.

Re:Natural Clues

[Chatsubo]

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.