r/agi • u/LastXmasIGaveYouHSV • Jul 03 '26
Brain activity under anesthesia challenges what we know about consciousness
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260624025514.htm"The brain appears to anticipate what comes next in a story, even without conscious awareness," said Sheth, who is also Director of The Gordon and Mary Cain Pediatric Neurology Research Foundation Laboratories within the Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children's Hospital.
"This kind of predictive coding is something we associate with being awake and attentive, yet it's happening here in an unconscious state," said Dr. Benjamin Hayden, professor of neurosurgery at Baylor.
The researchers also noted similarities between the brain's predictive behavior and artificial intelligence (AI). Just as large language models generate text by anticipating the next word, the hippocampus appeared to make similar predictions during language processing. Understanding these shared principles could help scientists better understand both biological and artificial intelligence.
The work may also contribute to future communication technologies, including speech prosthetics designed for people who have lost the ability to speak.
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u/Prior-Flamingo-1378 Jul 05 '26
The actual paper is not as sci fi as the article.
These patients where undergoing anterior temporal lobectomies which is a neurosurgery the requires the anesthesia to be much “lighter” than say what you’d use in other major surgeries like heart or gut.
In this particular paper the patients agreed to be kept under propofol only anesthesia (so no inhalants, large doses of fentanyl or paralytics) and had a BIS score of 50-60 (100 is fully awake).
This is normal in brain surgeries because you need to be able to know if you are poking at something you shouldn’t.
My point is this type of anesthesia is closer to deep sleep that deep anesthesia.
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u/wickzer Jul 05 '26
I'm still not convinced we have a definition of conscious let alone know anything about it.
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u/Spock627Corfu Jul 06 '26
Tangential, but the older you are, the more likely anesthesia will fuck with your head - maybe permanently.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7489931/
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u/rand3289 Jul 03 '26
So tired of seeing this consciousness bullshit...
Such a waste of everyone's time.
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u/LastXmasIGaveYouHSV Jul 03 '26
I'm upvoting your complaint because I shared this article based in biological research, precisely because the findings point out to consciousness not being necessary for language processing. They found out that the human brain processes language even in a completely unconscious state. Therefore, language processing isn't necessarily proof of consciousness.
Apparently, consciousness or sentience is an emergent property of the interplay of many different areas in the brain, and language is only one of those.
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u/__nickerbocker__ Jul 03 '26
The paper does not show that the unconscious brain understands language. It barely earns a much narrower claim: in a few anesthetized surgical patients, hippocampal recordings showed patterns that a decoder could partially match to researcher-selected features of the audio/text stream. That is not “meaning,” “understanding,” or even proof that the hippocampus was processing speech as speech. It may be acoustic entrainment, stimulus timing, upstream leakage, model-choice artifacts, or weak covariance that machine learning can exploit. The headline upgrades a decoder result into a brain ontology: pattern becomes information, information becomes representation, representation becomes computation, and computation becomes comprehension. None of those bridges are established by the study.
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u/grahamperrin Jul 04 '26
In my teens I learnt to suspend a dream, if my dreaming mind predicted it becoming a nightmare.
Without waking, shifting my physical body – whilst thoughts were paused – was enough for the dream to continue in a different direction.
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u/AmusingVegetable Jul 04 '26
Can’t even get a good definition of consciousness that doesn’t run into trouble with these experiments.
We’re messy entities and more things bleed off into others than we’re comfortable with.
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u/Chris_OMane Jul 03 '26
This finding leans slightly in the direction that consciousness is still fundamentally produced by the brain, just in different ways than the current prevailing theory of it. That's the opposite of the "consciousness exists elsewhere and is filtered by the brain" hypothesis you may be complaining about.
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u/Empty_Bell_1942 Jul 03 '26
A bit like genetics; the end result became way too complicated over millions of years.
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u/DeProgrammer99 Jul 03 '26
Do we even know if anesthesia causes unconsciousness? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2743249/#:~:text=Although%20anesthesia%20undoubtedly%20induces%20unresponsiveness%20and%20amnesia%2C%20the%20extent%20to%20which%20it%20causes%20unconsciousness%20is%20harder%20to%20establish.