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In cool, clinical language it’s known as “unintended intraoperative awareness with recall” — waking during surgery, unable to speak or move.

It’s estimated that as many as one or two in every 1,000 people who receive general anesthesia experiences it. People have described waking with their eyes taped shut and hearing surgeons say, “cut deeper,” or hands moving instruments inside their bodies and trying desperately to signal — with a shrug, a twitch —that they’re conscious.

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Now, researchers are trying to reduce the rare but real nightmare phenomenon by applying what they’re learning from another group of patients who appear to lack consciousness but who are, in fact, aware: people misdiagnosed as being in a vegetative state.

The goal, they say, is to minimize the harm to people of surgical awareness and find better ways to detect conscious thought in people believed to be entirely oblivious. Currently, no monitor exists that can rule awareness out in 100 per cent of cases.