unconscious but doing languaging

meika loofs samorzewski

Via medicalxpress.com when scrolling on my phone,

“Baylor College of Medicine researchers have found that the human brain is capable of sophisticated language processing while in an unconscious state from general anesthesia.”

So I’ve become aware of the following article in Nature “Plasticity and Language in the Anaesthetized Human Hippocampus.”

I took a few things away from this quick scroll, but confirmed my bias I guess, not generated new ideas or suspicions:

  1. "AI" known as LLMs are, again, probably not conscious machinery, but then how much are we like that? Are we even intelligent?

  2. Talking to coma patients is not completely stupid.

  3. languages as learned by babies are are mess precisely because languages are learned by people who have no idea but a strong urge and desire to make an effort to do so, whatever that is.

  4. may explain why I write most of my writing early in the morning before I have properly woken up and am not properly asleep (I’ve written three this morning, and designed a connector for my new rock trolley so the remote electric mower can tow it) this post is the last one I thought up, on reflection of the other three, but written up first, it’s Saturday so I have time to do so, most mornings I do not.

  5. Go Terrence Deacon et al! no to Chomsky/Pinker though the idea of a LAD (language acquisition device) may seem to be supported by this, certainly the idea may eek out a living in a rewriting of what consciousness is/does with reference to ideas of recursion, certainly the ancient idea of order as a universal syntax and grammar as the glamorous magic of ORDER’S innate powers, like some god-ghost in the machine are again looking like an over-blown balloon, or bladder, full of bull… —or phallus… wait are they all the same word etymologically??

  6. forgot.

  7. Arh, lots of thoughts on language and consciousness, and language and intelligence and consciousness and intelligence which as yet make no sense.

References:

Katlowitz, Kalman A. et al. “Plasticity and Language in the Anaesthetized Human Hippocampus.” Nature (2026): 1–10. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10448-0

via

Baylor College of Medicine. “While Patients Lay Unconscious under Anesthesia, Their Brains Kept Decoding Stories and Preparing for What Came Next.” https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-patients-lay-unconscious-anesthesia-brains.html

 

See also Posts on writing, consciousness and altered states.

Crossposted on substack.com