Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine have discovered that the human brain can continue performing surprisingly advanced language tasks even when a person is fully unconscious under general anesthesia. Patients under general anesthesia could still process language at a sophisticated level, distinguishing nouns, verbs, and adjectives while listening to stories, and neural activity showed signs of predicting upcoming words before they were heard. Neural activity showed that the brain was sorting through nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and was even trying to predict the next word in a sentence, not dissimilar to the way that generative AI models formulate responses by looking for the most likely next word. The results challenge traditional ideas about consciousness and hint at new possibilities for brain-computer interfaces.
If the unconscious brain can run language models, then consciousness is not the engine doing the thinking, it's something else, watching the work get done.