If you’ve ever had major surgery, you have probably had a general anaesthetic and, thankfully, don’t remember anything about it. The experience feels as though the brain is just ‘switched off’ for the period of the operation.
But new research shows that, although we are unconscious under general anaesthetic, parts of the brain are still active. Patients under anaesthesia were shown, under research conditions, to respond to sounds. If they were hearing podcasts, they responded to the speech they heard in real time, recognising and responding to individual words, and even using prior knowledge to predict what the speaker was going to say next. Although the patients were unconscious, their brains were displaying similar sorts of neural activity to those of people who are awake.
Language, it seems, is so ingrained in us as a species that we just can’t turn it off, even when we are knocked out. These discoveries highlight fascinating research pathways for the role of language for people who are asleep or in comas.
Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-group-of-doctors-performing-surgery-on-a-patient-ZuIucrhwHvA
