- The anesthetized hippocampus retained the ability to detect unexpected (“oddball”) sounds and adapt to them over time, demonstrating neural plasticity during unconsciousness.
- Hippocampal neurons encoded semantic meaning and grammatical structure from natural speech despite loss of consciousness.
- Neural activity could predict information about upcoming words, suggesting preserved contextual language processing under anesthesia.
- Computational modeling showed that oddball learning and representation could emerge from local recurrent neural network dynamics without conscious awareness.
- The findings challenge the idea that sophisticated cognition requires consciousness and instead suggest that some high-level processing can occur subconsciously.
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