The news was presented at the AAAS meeting in Phoenix, Arizona. Anna Fowler presented a synthesis of dozens of studies on near-death experiences and neuroelectrical activity around cardiac arrest. - https://particle.news/story/aaas-presentation-argues-consciousness-may-persist-minutes-to-hours-after-clinical-death
I think the consciousness they’re talking about here is the subjective sense of something happening - that it feels like something to be. The fact of experience itself. Unconsciousness in the medical sense doesn’t necessarily mean the end of experience.
I can tell you from experience, you are not aware of being unconscious. It goes from the moment before you lose it, to when you regain without any period between.
There are multiple ways to be “unconscious.” Head trauma, sleep, general anesthesia, fainting, coma - for example.
The experience varies wildly: from absolute nothing under general anesthesia to extremely vivid stuff during sleep.
This is a really difficult concept for some people in our modern society. Enlightenment style thinking would have you believe that human consciousness is a blanket term for salience, attention, awareness, sentience, social cognition, self-recognition, meta-cognition, etc. It’s as though you looked at a car and didn’t see its component parts or individual qualities, you just saw this weird new thing called Car.