Using high-density Neuropixels probes during surgery, researchers at Baylor monitored individual hippocampal neurons while patients were under general anesthesia. When the team played audio to the unconscious patients, these cells still distinguished unexpected tones from repeating ones, sorted words into grammatical categories like nouns and verbs, and showed activity that anticipated what word would follow in a sentence. The basic machinery of predictive coding appears to continue running even when subjective awareness is suppressed.
We usually treat predictive language processing as something requiring conscious attention, but this indicates the brain handles structural prediction as a low-level background task. That said, the data comes from a small cohort of epilepsy surgery patients, and registering the statistical patterns of incoming speech is a very long way from comprehension.
more: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261015003440.htm
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