Researchers found that patients under general anesthesia could still process language at a sophisticated level, distinguishing nouns, verbs, and adjectives while listening to stories. Even more remarkably, neural activity showed signs of predicting upcoming words before they were heard. The hippocampus consistently showed evidence of processing incoming language in real time. 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. The results challenge traditional ideas about consciousness and hint at new possibilities for brain-computer interfaces. The findings complicate the simple equation of consciousness with certain kinds of processing: this kind of predictive coding is associated with being awake and attentive, yet it's happening in an unconscious state, suggesting that certain processing abilities may not be anchored to consciousness.
Your unconscious brain is smarter than your conscious brain is comfortable admitting, and neuroscience just proved it.