5 ms·
Plasticity and language in the anaesthetized human hippocampus
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10448-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10448-0
- pstuart 5mo agoI guess this makes sense -- a brain is gonna do brain stuff. The only difference is that we're not present to witness it.
- doginasuit 5mo agoIt's been understood for quite some time that we only experience a small part of brain activity. Unfortunately that small part is where everything useful happens.
- Kim_Bruning 5mo agoOr is the small part the bit where the least useful stuff happens? ;-) A bit more seriously, the brain actually uses a significant chunk of the body's energy budget (no matter how efficient it is relative to human made equipment). So evolutionarily, it doesn't make sense unless it's doing something exceptionally useful.
- avadodin 5mo agoIt's the part that makes everything useful happen but most of everything useful happens in unconscious parts of the brain and even outside of the brain.
- satvikpendem 5mo agoNo, definitely not. Our consciousness is honestly an afterthought, as the brain processes mountains of information that does not even get to out conscious level yet is arguably more useful than anything we primitive primates can think of.
- johnbarron 5mo agoThis is not new. Read Phantoms in the Brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantoms_in_the_Brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantoms_in_the_Brain
- mrsvanwinkle 5mo agoawesome to see a VS Ramachandran rec on HN. normally it's the rare secondary rec after someone mentions Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat by Oliver Sacks.
- satvikpendem 5mo agoMaybe I just know how it's like to be a bat.
- alexfromapex 5mo agoI would think anesthesia, in specific doses, would only attenuate consciousness...if it stopped other processes your organs and nervous system would stop. I guess this confirms that.
- EA-3167 5mo agoGeneral anesthesia disrupts the ability of regions of the brain to network coherently. Individual regions might still be ticking along, but your experience of consciousness is a result of the network.
- alexfromapex 5mo agoYou state that like it's a fact. I didn't realize we understood everything about consciousness and the brain. The more you know.
- EA-3167 5mo agoI’d argue that general anesthesia is the experiment that proves the fact. It’s a blunt and low resolution one admittedly, I wouldn’t use it to make any strong case about consciousness other than that our experience of it clearly requires coordination across many networked brain regions. As far as what’s going on within the individual regions or cells I’m not venturing a guess. Likewise I’m not claiming it to understand why networking of the whole brain is required to be conscious, but take some propofol and you’ll know that it is.
- healthworker 5mo agoThis is strong evidence against LLMs experiencing qualia. (I know that that topic often gets people laughed out of the room but please don't jump on me for engaging in that debate. When we can collect evidence and be able to show it to people.)
- stupidgeek314 5mo agoholy no sequitur batman!
- ordu 5mo agoHow did you jumped to qualia from consciousness? I can see how this is a strong evidence against LLM being conscious, but to my mind it doesn't imply in any way or form that they do not experience qualia. Or... well, ok, maybe they can't experience if they are not conscious? I see how this can be argued, but I still do not agree. I'm sure qualia is created not by consciousness (I would notice if it was), and I'm sure it is created not for consciousness specifically, it must have some other uses too.
- stevenhuang 5mo agoNo disagreements with what you said in your first paragraph. > I'm sure qualia is created not by consciousness Whether or not qualia is created by consciousness, I don't see how we necessarily can tell one way or the other. We don't exactly have great introspective tools to do such self analysis, not to mention what we think we feel is often illusory/not reflective of reality.
- ordu 5mo agoYeah, I think you are right. "The content of consciousness" and "consciousness" are different things, and I mixed them up, when writing that sentence. I can watch the content, but not other parts that may be producing it. Moreover, thinking about it, I come to a conclusion, that if I cannot reflect on qualia creation, then it is a (weak) evidence for qualia created by consciousness. I suppose the consciousness is harder to reflect on than other things, hard to map it into states of the content of consciousness. Like, I can reflect on my vision and see some hints on how I get these wonderful pictures, despite it being definitely not consciousness, I can reflect on how I produce or decode language. And to my mind it is because consciousness was devised to reflect on these things, so I could report on my observations to others. But to reflect on itself is a wholly different matter.
- slicktux 5mo agoI sometimes ge the most complex logical dreams whilst going to sleep on a programming problem. The dreams are normal dreams but structured like a programming problem or logic…it’s like my brain is trying to dream normally but it’s also Fixated on programming logic so it subliminally incorporates it into dreams. Then I wake up and I feel like I’ve compiled the whole code in my head and did not rest.
- QuaternionsBhop 5mo agoThis happens to me too. Often my dream plows forwards with unsound assumptions and I wake up believing something confusing.
- anyfoo 5mo agoI haven't had this in a long time, except for on the (fortunately rare) occasion that I have a fever. Fever dreams are already hell, but if they're non-sensical programming/computer science fever dreams, they were extra hell. I remember one particular one a few decades ago, where I was feverishly (pun intended) trying to achieve something with XML, only it being a fever dream, nothing of it made sense, so I was wracking my brain for nonsense those entire hours.
- lukan 5mo agoWell, maybe you did work on your problems in your sleep and did get less rest because of it, so the new insights you got the next day(s), the groundwork for it might have happened in your sleepwork.
- chrisweekly 5mo agoI've had similar experiences, and (having studied neuroscience as an undergrad and in casual / amateur research in the many years since) feel there's a lot of untapped potential to leverage in our hypnopompic and hypnogogic states (at the fuzzy boundaries of sleeping / wakefulness). Fascinating stuff. (tangent) Also, please forgive my question which may seem impolite but I really want to know: why did you type "whilst" instead of "when" or "while"? Have you ever said the word "whilst" out loud, in a normal conversation? More letters, an extra (half)syllable, zero meaning or nuance added, I just don't get it. I wonder this every time I see it, mean no disrespect and would be grateful for a straightforward reply. (/tangent)
- jdw64 5mo agoIf that mechanism can be activated, it may significantly compress the time required for education and learning.
- mrexcess 5mo agoOr, worryingly, unsolicited brainwashing, no?
- NonHyloMorph 5mo agoshhh! the baby's sleeping!
- westurner 5mo agoScholarlyArticle: "Plasticity and language in the anaesthetized human hippocampus" (2026) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10448-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10448-0 Sleep-learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep-learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep-learning Also, Sleep and learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_and_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_and_learning
- tgv 5mo agoThis sounds odd to me: > ... neural signals could predict upcoming words in a sentence. ... This kind of predictive coding is something we associate with being awake and attentive, yet it’s happening here in an unconscious state In psycholinguistics, the assumption is, and always has been, that language processing is unconscious, a background process like visual object recognition. For starters, conscious attention is too slow by two orders of magnitude, and infants can process language, while presumably not yet (fully) conscious.
- abyssin 5mo agoWhat you call "conscious attention" seems to be a sort of cognitive process. What the article calls unconscious state is a state. The idea is that in some states, some processes (like predictive coding) don't take place.
- tgv 5mo agoComatose patients show EEG activity related to sound and language processing. That has been known for at least 30 years (a quick search turns up e.g. https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(95)90252-X.pdf https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736...). The article also speaks about attention. I even quoted that bit.