Hippocampus tracks language and predicts words during general anesthesia, study reports

The short version

• Baylor College of Medicine researchers recorded hippocampal neurons in epilepsy surgery patients under general anesthesia, ScienceDaily reports.[ScienceDaily]
• Neural activity distinguished unexpected tones, improved over time, and carried word-category and upcoming-word information.[ScienceDaily]
• Findings cover one anesthetic and the hippocampus only; whether sleep or coma shows similar processing is unknown.[ScienceDaily]

Key facts

• Baylor College of Medicine researchers recorded electrical signals from hundreds of individual hippocampal neurons in patients undergoing epilepsy surgery under general anesthesia, using Neuropixels probes.[ScienceDaily]
• The study was published in the journal Nature under the title 'Plasticity and language in the anaesthetized human hippocampus'.[ScienceDaily]
• During anesthesia, hippocampal neurons responded differently to unexpected repeating tones and became better at distinguishing them over time.[ScienceDaily]
• Hippocampal activity carried information about nouns, verbs and adjectives, and could be used to predict upcoming words in short stories played to anesthetized patients.[ScienceDaily]
• The experiments were conducted under one type of general anesthesia and focused only on the hippocampus.[ScienceDaily]

Sources

Outlet counts describe coverage, not independent confirmation. Reports may share a wire service or original source.

• Mysterious brain activity under anesthesia challenges what we know about consciousnessScienceDaily - Science