'Vegetative' patient speaks to scientists using his brainwaves
news.scotsman.com
news.scotsman.com
I've told everyone close to me that if I am injured badly they are to ask for 'no extreme measures' for this exact reason...
You should consider a living will if you are serious about avoiding this.
Being Locked-in is one of the worst things I can imagine and yet is very real.
What I was trying to convey was that no matter how dedicated your loved ones are they're not going to be with you every minute of every day if you're apparently comatose. That means this poor guy has probably spent most of the last six years lying in a bed by himself with nothing going on around him...
This test demonstrates he can at least hear sound. I'd imagine the effects would resemble senility from lack of engagement more.
Also, interesting side note, sleeping drugs such as Ambien in some cases allowed patients in coma to regain awareness and even hold CONVERSATION: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2006/sep/12/health.healtha...
Over stimulation by excitatory neurotransmitters is the primary cause of neuron death during stroke, the idea is that many neurons thought to be dead might have just shutdown to prevent from being overstimulated. And if baseline stimulation is reduced enough through what is normally sleeping medication, they might actually start to activate again.
Here is the story boy that was unable to speak or contact with world and was considered "vegetable" by doctors, till he picked up a language BLISS from a teacher that was teaching some other child in his hospital room.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvpGLxU6fVY
He is a poet now.
That sank without a trace - no comments, no upvotes - perhaps this report will get a better response. I think it's interesting, so I hope it does.
It's a fascinating idea, getting yes/no answers from brain scans. The potential is there for using text output devices similar to those that Hawking uses, except driven by the patient imagining playing tennis.
That's because it didn't mention the Ipad.
The real question from this though is about the patient's rights to choose. IANAL but if I understand it correctly this could cause difficult questions in consent, especially where minors are concerned.
"The entire book was written by Bauby blinking his left eyelid, which took ten months (four hours a day). A transcriber repeatedly recited a French language frequency-ordered alphabet (E, S, A, R, I, N, T, U, L, etc.), until Bauby blinked to choose the next letter. The book took about 200,000 blinks to write and an average word took approximately two minutes. The book also chronicles everyday events for a person with locked-in syndrome."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diving_Bell_and_the_Butterf...
Even better - some hybrid algorithm that goes through the most common letters then goes into binary search for the remaining letters (many of which appear at approximately equal frequency)
For example, the patient didn't answer the last question because.. he fell asleep? I would imagine if I was trapped inside my body and suddenly given a mechanism to communicate, I would be too excited to fall asleep.
Did they observe any signs of excitement that I would expect a person to feel in this situation? Increased heart rate or other brain activity? Did the man try to convey his own message using the new-found communication mechanism?
It almost sounds like they are communicating with some small ghost of the man's subconscious, something that can respond to basic queries and recall memories, but lacks what we would really consider a consciousness.
If I understand correctly, he was given the means to convey "yes" by imagining himself playing tennis. The concept of "no" was encoded by the absence of "yes".
If he had wanted to send some message, like "tell my children I love them", or "I feel pain in my abdomen", how would he encode it?
That said, he probably did the correct thing by simply answering their questions. That shows that "someone is home" better than flipping his bit randomly.
The absence of anything was recorded as "no answer".
They probably made that assumption because people fall asleep inside MRI's all of the time, especially during extremely long fMRI tests, when they try to isolate the senses (i.e. it's very dark, you wear earplugs and ear phones). Also, the brain damage might predispose someone to have a short attention span/wakeful periods.
This patient is obviously severely brain damaged.
If you've ever seen a person recovering from brain trauma, you'll know that their ability to focus is usually minimal. Answering questions for this patient may very well have been exhausting. This means that out of the other 22 patients in the study, some may be conscious but unable to cooperate long enough for the mnesic trace to be recorded.
Regarding other signs of activity, you can't detect random activity using fMRI. I haven't read this paper so I don't know the details (I'm only familiar with previous studies done by this team), but regarding heart rate, blod presure, etc, the brain damage may prevent it from occurring too.
Since he was only able to produce yes and no ansers using a contrieved process, he was of course unable to produce any other message.
He's definitely conscious.
Imagine being locked-in for so many years, and then suddenly being asked to imagine things. It's not as easy as it sounds: Imagining something in such a strict order over such a long period of time is actually quite exhausting.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/313/5792/1402
However, I think their publishing the idea that these patients were "conscious" is morally questionable. The reasons for this are expressed far more elegantly that I could manage by Parashkev Nachev in the following response:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/sci;315/5816/1221a.pdf