Chilling
There is an article right now that has been sending ripples through the scientific community. It is about using functional MRI scans to communicate with patients in a persistent vegetative state or those with the eerie diagnosis of a "minimally conscious state". Basically, when you voluntarily think of doing some kind of physical task (such as playing tennis), you activate your supplementary motor area. When you imagine navigating a city or your house, you activate the parahippocampal gyrus. These results are very consistent. So if you ask someone "is your father's name Thomas?", and say to imagine tennis for "yes" and navigation for "no", you can "decode" the imagery. It is a wild study. In 5 of the 54, they found these "vegetative" patients could voluntarily imagine the tennis or navigation. In one patient (out of 54), they found the participant could answer 5 of the 6 questions in a way that corresponds to the factually correct questions. For the 6th question, there was virtually no activity. The researchers don't know whether the participant fell asleep, was tired, or simply lost awareness.
One of the very chilling things about this article is the way they describe this minimally conscious state. We tend to think of consciousness as on or off, but acknowledge there is a little middle ground, such as when we are waking up. However, this article adds whole new layers of subtlety to our understanding. Honestly the best word to describe the picture the article paints is "chilling".
The patients may have residual cognitive function and even conscious awareness.
And the researchers have no way to know whether more participants had some kind of awareness but simply sustained too much damage to still understand language. It is possible to have deficits of language but not of hearing. They should have had the directions at least presented in writing rather than just with speaking, in case some could still read but not understand spoken language.
What would it be like to have an existence mentally fading in and out of awareness or having certain cognitive faculties in tact but not others? Or perhaps, you lose those faculties at some points in time but retain them at other points?
To give you an example of what the brain of someone in a vegetative state looks like, see the image below. Do you see the gaping holes??
One of the very chilling things about this article is the way they describe this minimally conscious state. We tend to think of consciousness as on or off, but acknowledge there is a little middle ground, such as when we are waking up. However, this article adds whole new layers of subtlety to our understanding. Honestly the best word to describe the picture the article paints is "chilling".
The patients may have residual cognitive function and even conscious awareness.
And the researchers have no way to know whether more participants had some kind of awareness but simply sustained too much damage to still understand language. It is possible to have deficits of language but not of hearing. They should have had the directions at least presented in writing rather than just with speaking, in case some could still read but not understand spoken language.
What would it be like to have an existence mentally fading in and out of awareness or having certain cognitive faculties in tact but not others? Or perhaps, you lose those faculties at some points in time but retain them at other points?
To give you an example of what the brain of someone in a vegetative state looks like, see the image below. Do you see the gaping holes??