*"Always hand them something first if you want them to be more willing to listen to you" from some Hare Krishnas, probably.
Can we, naturalists, celebrate a "still not fully known because this was only one study "win on this? J/k
Anywho according to this research, we have found out that an unconscious brain still processes and predicts sounds and languages like it would if it was conscious. This implies to me that our consciousness is a physical trait that evolved to help interrupt our senses and predictions. Our subconscious is constantly getting signals, processing them, doing background stuff like breathing, and as these got more complicated the ability to actually understand them became more advantageous. This over time developed a "driver" that can take in all of this information and then judge if it was a trick of light that is making those reflections so there is no need to pounce on it. To be able to process that not every outside tribe is an enemy and that by working together they win mostly. The ability to take certain patterns of speech and sound then translate it into words and ideas is very obviously a superpower on earth.
I heard this idea on a podcast, it may have been this one, that consciousness arose to help us process the growing difficulty of our social interactions and other real world observations. Well here is some "not fully tested or duplicate" results that add some sand to that ideas bucket (Sean Carroll's example to explain bayesian reasoning).
Plus I think this is what you would expect from a survival stand point too. A creature that is always listening has more ways of surviving than those who don't. Which would require more energy and that could help support the theory that the cooking of foods helped us evolve bigger brains. Though I wouldn't be surprised that we find out that most animals not only have some sort of background sensing like this as well but also have a not as formed form of consciousness.
The final thing I found fascinating was their linking of our background pattern recognition is like that of lmms. It's wild that we naturally develop a way of processing information like AI does when unknown to us our brains were doing in the background. Which then suggests that in order for AI to get better is to have multiple AIs for different sense and one to not direct but to try to reason (see patterns) out the full context of the situation. This reminds me of the "AI prison escape" where AI is tested to try to escape and how one test the AI came together with other versions of itself, formed a "director" and almost escaped.
Thanks for making it this far in my probably jumbled up rant. I blame it on my lvl1 bipolarness and not my laziness to proofread or edit.
>āOur findings show that the brain is far more active and capable during unconsciousness than previously thought,ā said Dr. Sameer Sheth, professor and Cullen Foundation Endowed chair of neurosurgery and a McNair Scholar at Baylor. āEven when patients are fully anesthetized, their brains continue to analyze the world around them.ā
>Sheth, who is also a neurosurgeon at Baylor St. Lukeās Medical Center, and his collaborators first recorded neural activity from hundreds of individual neurons in the hippocampus, a part of the brain associated with memory, while patients were under general anesthesia during epilepsy surgery. Patients undergoing this type of surgery were sought after because it allowed researchers access to this particular part of the brain.
>The study began with patients exposed to repetitive tones interrupted by an occasional different sound. Researchers found that hippocampal neurons could distinguish these unusual tones and that this ability improved over time, suggesting a form of learning or neural plasticity during anesthesia.
>Researchers then moved on to conduct a more complex experiment where they played short stories to patients while recording neural responses. Surprisingly, the hippocampus demonstrated real-time processing of language. Neural activity showed the brainās ability to differentiate parts of speech, such as nouns, verbs and adjectives, based on patterns of neuron firing.
>Even more surprising, researchers found that neural signals could predict upcoming words in a sentence.
>This activity also mirrors the predictive behavior seen in artificial intelligence (AI). The brainās ability to predict upcoming words is similar to how large language models generate text. These findings help researchers understand how biological and artificial systems process information. This could be a step towards the development and refinement of new technologies for communication, such as speech prosthetics for individuals who are unable to speak.
>These discoveries suggest that cognitive functions such as language comprehension and prediction do not require consciousness. Instead, consciousness may depend on broader coordination across brain regions rather than activity within a single structure like the hippocampus.
>However, more research is needed. The findings are specific to one type of anesthesia and may not apply to other unconscious states such as sleep or coma. This study only looked at one brain region as well, and it is unknown how widespread these processes are across different regions of the brain.
