Wednesday, February 03, 2010
Too late for Terry, but......
In Britain a very clever use of brain scans has shown without any doubt that (at least some) patients in persistent vegetative states have full consciousness and full communicative ability.
Polistra focused on the Terry Schiavo case for the first few months of this blog back in '05, and hoped someone would use such a technique on Terry. It never happened in that case. Now this refined technique will make it possible to separate patients who have latent abilities worth developing, from those who are truly "blank". ¶ 7:02 PM
[Dr. Adrian Owen was] studying a 29-year-old man brain damaged in a car crash in 2003.
The man was in a coma for two years before slipping into a persistent vegetative state. He was seemingly awake, occasionally blinked, but showed no other sign of being aware of the outside world.
They used a hi-tech functional magnetic resonance scanner (fMRI) to measure brain response while the patient was asked questions.
Because the actual brain signals associated with Yes and No are complicated and too similar to distinguish, they came up with a usable code.
The team asked the patient to think of playing tennis for Yes and moving around his home for No.
While the movement in tennis sparks spatial areas at the top of the brain, the navigational task of moving around your home sparks the motion areas at the base of the brain.
The patient was then asked six simple biographical questions including the name of his father and whether he had any sisters. In each case, his thoughts were picked up by the scans within five minutes. In each case he was 100 per cent accurate.
Polistra focused on the Terry Schiavo case for the first few months of this blog back in '05, and hoped someone would use such a technique on Terry. It never happened in that case. Now this refined technique will make it possible to separate patients who have latent abilities worth developing, from those who are truly "blank". ¶ 7:02 PM
