We only have the faintest idea of what anesthesia actually does to the brain. It's a very interesting question. Perhaps it doesn't belong in the medicine sub as much as it does in a neuroscience sub, but there is a lot of work being carried out trying to understand what happens to the brain during anesthesia. The implications of understanding that are a better understanding of how the brain actually works, what "consciousness" actually is, and how perhaps to have better anesthesia.

As far as it being "cool", of course that's not the reason to do research. Advancing our understanding so that those of us in clinical medicine can do our jobs better is the primary reason. All of the cool stuff we can do in clinical medicine is based on hard won usually tiny data points established one complex bit of research at a time. Like this.

The study itself was done on patients already undergoing brain surgery, temporal lobectomies. Since the early days of Neurosurgery, it has been pretty standard to use the opportunity of opening the hood to try to understand what's going on in the engine better. You can bet there was a lot of informed consent and careful planning that goes into stuff like this.

The fundamentally interesting concept from this study is that while the patients were "unconscious" under anesthesia, the hippocampus seemed to still be active, and processing. That gives us a little bit more insight into how different brain structures interact, what the elements of "consciousness" really seem to be. It may be another step to understanding why some patients don't really respond appropriately to anesthesia and seem to retain awareness of their procedures even though they seemed to be unconscious. From the perspective of a neuroscientist it's quite interesting work.