I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream
For a long time, it was supposed that people in a persistent vegetative state are simply that: vegetables. The automatic systems of the body are functioning, more or less, but there's no one behind the wheel. There's no sign of consciousness. No movement, no flicker of the eyelids. They're not in a coma, but their brain damage is so severe that there is no awareness of what is going on around them.
Recent research in Belgium and the UK has changed that view. Apparently, some vegetative patients are aware, they just can't respond.
The study took healthy volunteers and scanned them using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). They asked the volunteers to imagine the act of playing tennis, and mapped what areas of the brain lit up, in this case the pre-motor cortex.
The difference in brain activity between imagining doing something like playing tennis, versus imagining seeing something like a meadow or a street, gave the researchers the ability to ask "yes" or "no" questions and receive the answer solely by watching what the person in the fMRI machine was thinking.
Then they used it on persistent vegetative patients. 19 of the 23 patients did not show any response in the fMRI machine. But four did.
One man, a Belgian who'd been persistently vegetative since being injured in a traffic accident seven years ago, apparently heard the researchers' instructions and was able to correctly answer five out of six questions, including identifying his father's first name.
And all I can think of is the one Edgar Allen Poe story that most frightened me as a middle school student: The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar. The story was about the then-mysterious subject of mesmerism. The narrator is fascinated by it, and notes that no one had ever been hypnotized "in articulo mortis" - at the point of death. His friend Ernest Valdemar is dying of "phthisis" (tuberculosis), and agrees to the experiment. The hypnotic passes are made, and Valdemar stops breathing. He lies dead but not decomposing for seven months, cold, pale, without pulse or breath. Finally the narrator tries to wake him. A hideous unearthly voice from an unmoving mouth and lolling tongue begs, "For God's sake!-quick!-quick!-put me to sleep-or, quick!-waken me!-quick!-I say to you that I am dead!" The narrator completes the passes to wake Valdemar, whose body is immediately reduced to putrescence.
I imagine being locked inside my own head, unable to move or communicate for seven years, and then someone talks to me and gives me the tiniest window through which I can communicate, even if only by answering yes or no, … and then turns off the MRI machine, his experiment complete.
Truly, there are worse things than death.
Recent research in Belgium and the UK has changed that view. Apparently, some vegetative patients are aware, they just can't respond.
The study took healthy volunteers and scanned them using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). They asked the volunteers to imagine the act of playing tennis, and mapped what areas of the brain lit up, in this case the pre-motor cortex.
The difference in brain activity between imagining doing something like playing tennis, versus imagining seeing something like a meadow or a street, gave the researchers the ability to ask "yes" or "no" questions and receive the answer solely by watching what the person in the fMRI machine was thinking.
Then they used it on persistent vegetative patients. 19 of the 23 patients did not show any response in the fMRI machine. But four did.
One man, a Belgian who'd been persistently vegetative since being injured in a traffic accident seven years ago, apparently heard the researchers' instructions and was able to correctly answer five out of six questions, including identifying his father's first name.
And all I can think of is the one Edgar Allen Poe story that most frightened me as a middle school student: The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar. The story was about the then-mysterious subject of mesmerism. The narrator is fascinated by it, and notes that no one had ever been hypnotized "in articulo mortis" - at the point of death. His friend Ernest Valdemar is dying of "phthisis" (tuberculosis), and agrees to the experiment. The hypnotic passes are made, and Valdemar stops breathing. He lies dead but not decomposing for seven months, cold, pale, without pulse or breath. Finally the narrator tries to wake him. A hideous unearthly voice from an unmoving mouth and lolling tongue begs, "For God's sake!-quick!-quick!-put me to sleep-or, quick!-waken me!-quick!-I say to you that I am dead!" The narrator completes the passes to wake Valdemar, whose body is immediately reduced to putrescence.
I imagine being locked inside my own head, unable to move or communicate for seven years, and then someone talks to me and gives me the tiniest window through which I can communicate, even if only by answering yes or no, … and then turns off the MRI machine, his experiment complete.
Truly, there are worse things than death.