Teacher’s Questions for Coma

Teacher’s Questions for Coma

SCIENCE

Before reading:

1. What is sleep?
2. How does the body feel pain?
3. Have you ever been under anesthesia? How did you feel after it was over?

During reading:

1. How do anesthetics stop people from feeling pain?
2. What is the difference between local and general anesthesia?
3. What do doctors already know about how anesthesia drugs work in the body?
4. What is a sleep cycle? What are the two stages of a sleep cycle and how are they different?
5. How does the brain control the sleep cycle?
6. How does anesthesia affect the communication of brain cells?
7. Explain what the cerebral cortex and thalamus do in the brain.
8. How is sleep different from anesthesia?
9. What are the similarities between a coma and anesthesia? How are they different?
10.  Studying anesthesia will help doctors make better anesthesia drugs. Name two other ways these studies might help doctors.

After reading:

1. Researchers used an imaging technique called fMRI to see which parts of the brain were active during anesthesia. If you could use fMRI to track the brain, what behavior would you want to study? What would you want to learn?

SOCIAL STUDIES

1. Some day doctors might use energy fields rather than medicine to block pain. Why do you think doctors are looking for new ways to put people under anesthesia?