Finding the root of consciousness [?]

Courtesy of David Metcalfe - Neuroscience News reports a paper in the journal Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience which suggests that cortical layer 5 pyramidal (L5p) neurons "affect both cortical and thalamic processing, hence coupling the cortico-cortical and thalamo-cortical loops with each other. Functionally this coupling corresponds to the coupling between the state and the contents of consciousness." The significance of this is beyond me, but they make a testable prediction: "cortical processing that does not include L5p neurons will be unconscious."
https://neurosciencenews.com/l5p-neuron-...ess-14997/

The full paper is available here:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10....00043/full

Neuroscience News evidently hasn't heard about the Hard Problem of consciousness. And they haven't heard about some famous cases of normal functioning despite hydroencephaly reducing the brain's cortex to a thin membrane. At https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1...s-doctors/: 

A man with an unusually tiny brain manages to live an entirely normal life despite his condition, which was caused by a fluid build-up in his skull.

Scans of the 44-year-old man’s brain showed that a huge fluid-filled chamber called a ventricle took up most of the room in his skull, leaving little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue...

And there's this:                          

Of these cases of successful hemispherectomy, perhaps none is more astonishing than a case of a boy named Alex who did not start speaking until the left half of his brain was removed. A scientific paper describing the case says that Alex “failed to develop speech throughout early boyhood.” He could apparently say only one word (“mumma”) before his operation to cure epilepsy seizures. But then following a hemispherectomy (also called a hemidecortication) in which half of his brain was removed at age 8.5, “and withdrawal of anticonvulsants when he was more than 9 years old, Alex suddenly began to acquire speech.” We are told, “His most recent scores on tests of receptive and expressive language place him at an age equivalent of 8–10 years,” and that by age 10 he could “converse with copious and appropriate speech, involving some fairly long words.” Astonishingly, the boy who could not speak with a full brain could speak well after half of his brain was removed. The half of the brain removed was the left half – the very half that scientists tell us is the half that has more to do with language than the right half.