Consciousness
February 7th, 2010 by rbanks
Brain scan allows unconscious patient to communicate
“Owen and his collaborators repeated their fMRI experiments on 54 patients who had previously been classified as either vegetative or “minimally conscious” (a condition in which a patient may inconsistently respond to commands, but cannot communicate interactively). They found that five of these 54 patients responded to commands to imagine playing tennis or navigating through a familiar house. Four of those five patients had been classified as vegetative, but when clinicians repeated their assessment following the fMRI study, they found evidence that two of those four should instead have been classified as minimally conscious.”
Scientific American
