The attached article (1999) discusses the cases of four children between 5 and 17 years old, with congenital brain malformations involving total or near-total absence of cerebral cortex but who, nevertheless, possessed discriminative awareness: distinguishing familiar from unfamiliar people and environments, social interaction, functional vision, orienting, musical preferences, appropriate affective responses, and associative learning. These abilities may reflect "vertical" plasticity of brainstem and diencephalic structures.
The four cases mentioned above show that consciousness, or at least its certain forms, can be mediated subcortically, due to the developmental processes of vertical neuroplasticity.
Article Consciousness in congenitally decorticate children: developm...
A similar question is characteristic of modern times. Modern people use synthetic and natural drugs that act on the neurons of the cerebral cortex and turn off consciousness. These people resemble animals that, in this state, are able to eat grass as animals, bark, and exhibit other behavior characteristic of animals. One more example. Infringement of blood supply of certain parts of the cerebral cortex when people lose the ability to understand speech or pronounce words.
Of course, the cortex of the large hemispheres can not function effectively without other parts of the brain. For example, we constantly need links with the reticular formation of the brainstem, which sends tonic signals to the cells of the cerebral cortex. But we do not say that the heart is the source of consciousness on the grounds that the stopping of the heart is accompanied by the cessation of the flow of blood with oxygen to the brain and loss of consciousness. Look at a few articles on the subject of your question in the attachment.
https://sommeil.univ-lyon1.fr/articles/jouvet/hcn_69/p2.php
Yes, I understand, thank you. But I wonder if it is (in special developmental cases) possible for the subcortical structures by means of vertical neuroplasticity to take some cortical functions .
With my pleasure.
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~dons/part_2/chapter_17.html
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/reticular-activating-system
& in the Attachment
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