Brain Surgeon: Dream Patterns, Liminal States, & Subconscious Exploration - Dr Rahul Jandial

You just told me there are left-handed surgical instruments. What's that mean?

Um, for left-handed s-surgeons, the, the way some of the graspers click, um, it's released with a maneuver where your thumb pushes something outward.

Mm-hmm.

For left-handed surgeons, that can be sort of clunky, so they make instruments where it's outward for the left-handed surgeon is actually, uh, inward towards the midline, and for the right-handed surgeon, it's this way. So there are left and right, uh, handed instruments for different surgeons. Needle drivers really, where you click onto a needle and it clasps, so you don't have to keep pressure on it, and then you can do your maneuver.

Mm-hmm.

Stake knives also have serrations that lean one way or the other. I just learned that recently.

I didn't know about that at all.

I didn't... I know. I was just looking at it, because I've, I've got a buddy who's left-handed and he's like pointing all this left-handed stuff out in the world.

Oh, don't use that one. It's gonna cut completely incorrectly. What I did learn was, um, when you have a steak, I mean, I, I have to imagine this is slap bang in the middle of your area of expertise, but you want to never cut with the grain of the meat. You want to be cutting cross-grain.

Yeah. So that, that, that takes me to what's beautiful about surgery is like, it's, it's not like LEGOs. It's not like, you know, hammers and chisel. It can be with, you know, orthopedic surgeons and spine surgery. But when you have somebody who can lightly with a p- uh, with a tweezer, a pickup we call it, lift something up and you see some membranes that are holding two planes together. All right, let's say you have two planes of tissue, and they're held together with this fine web of membranes. You lift it up and you take a scissor upside down and you just spread lightly and the membranes fall apart and the tissue comes apart. You're not really trying to tug and pull.

Mm-hmm.

If you do that with finesse, when the patient wakes up, they feel less injury, they feel less pain, less anesthesia, the operation goes better, less blood time. So everybody thinks surgery's all the same steps. "Do these 1,000 steps." No. It's sculpting, it's art. It... there's a finesse to it. And at some point, uh, when you see somebody who's good at something, i- it's, it's like ballet. Y- it's like something's being released. They're not like, "And now I will do this step." And, uh, that's the part I love about it is talent... It's more, it's more talent than smarts.

I love watching people in between doing the thing that they're supposed to do. So a good example of this is, uh, drummers. If you're ever watching a drummer play live and he loses a stick or he snaps or something like that, and he'll just immediately switch and he'll be playing with one hand and he'll just reach over and he'll grab another one. Or if a guitarist is playing and, "Bing," off goes a pick like that, and you'll watch him. Without even thinking about it, he'll do something, grab a pick from there, roll it between his fingers, and go back. And it's that liminal space. It's... I'm just so comfortable with my working environment.