Dr. Orin "Fred" Guidry, an anesthesiologist, explains the five elements of general anesthesia and how they interact to properly anesthetize a patient during surgery. He also talks about how those components are monitored, pointing to some of the current limitations in monitoring and measuring consciousness. Additionally, he distinguishes between procedures requiring the full range of general anesthesia components from those procedures during which complete unconsciousness is not actually the goal of the anesthesiologist.