Plasticity and language in the anaesthetized human hippocampus.
Nature June 1, 2026 Kalman A Katlowitz, Eric R Cole, Elizabeth A Mickiewicz et al.
Hippocampal neurons and local field potentials in anaesthetized humans retain the ability to detect oddball tones, process semantic and grammatical features of speech, and predict upcoming words, indicating that complex sensory processing persists during unconsciousness. The effect of oddball detection grew over roughly 10 minutes, demonstrating representational plasticity. A recurrent neural network model showed that learning and oddball representation emerge from flexible tone discrimination. These results indicate that the hippocampus, distant from primary sensory cortices, performs complex stimulus processing even in the unconscious state.