Posted on 10/17/2014 1:23:47 PM PDT by Scoutmaster
None of them were brain-dead; none of them were dead.
Nothing goes on outside the head. The height of any line shows the strength of the connection within the brain.
They say their study, published today in the journal Science, shows the woman was conscious despite her coma-like state, although several experts disagree.
The researchers stress that the study is unlikely to shed light on issues such as the case of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman who spent 15 years in a persistent vegetative state and was allowed to die in March 2005 after a long court battle.
Dr Adrian Owen, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge and colleagues in the UK and Belgium, used functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to look at the woman's brain in action.
The 23-year-old woman, who was injured in a car accident, had been unresponsive, unable to communicate, and met the clinical criteria for a vegetative state, the researchers say.
They looked at her brain function when listening to sentences such as, "There was milk and sugar in his coffee." The brain scan lit up in very similar ways to those seen in healthy volunteers, Owen's team found.
The researchers then asked the woman to imagine certain acts.
"One task involved imagining playing a game of tennis and the other involved imagining visiting all of the rooms of her house, starting from the front door," the researchers write.
Her scan lit up in virtually the same places as the brains of the healthy volunteers asked to do the same thing.
"These results confirm that ... this patient retained the ability to understand spoken commands and to respond to them through her brain activity, rather than through speech or movement," the researchers write.
She also clearly intended to cooperate, which "confirmed beyond any doubt that she was consciously aware of herself and her surroundings", they write.
"This is unlikely the case for all vegetative patients," Owen's team cautions in its report.
Experts note the woman had relatively little brain damage, and say traumatic brain injury often heals better than injury caused by stroke or heart attack such as Schiavo suffered.
Schiavo also had been in her state for far longer than the UK woman, allowing for severe deterioration of her brain.
Dr Ross Zafonte, a brain rehabilitation expert at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, says the study shows a unique way of assessing brain function using scans.
"They raise a whole issue regarding consciousness and how we use this term," Zafonte says.
"Is she just a rare bird? Will we see this on a more common basis?"
Other brain experts are sceptical.
"If this patient is actually conscious, why wouldn't she be able to engage in intentional overt motor acts, given that she had not suffered functional or structural lesion of the motor pathways?" asks Dr Lionel Naccache of France's INSERM research institute in a commentary published with the report.
He says the patient apparently has "a rich mental life, including auditory language processing and the ability to perform mental imagery tasks".
The study points to a need to develop better scans to assess a patient's brain status, Naccache says.
Dr Paul Matthews, a neuroscientist at Imperial College London and University of Oxford, says the study does not demonstrate consciousness.
"Response to stimuli, even complex linguistic stimuli, does not provide evidence of a 'decision' to respond. Withdrawal from an unexpected painful pin prick does not represent a 'decision' to respond," he says.
Thank you for the correction. You are right.
I'm going to read more about this study tonight. The second article appears to indicate that the 'success' story involved only one woman, who had been in a PVS for only five months, and who suffered only minor brain injury.
That's what I get for assuming that two journalists assigned to write about a scientific study will present similar facts.
Okay great. Come back and enlighten us. :^)
Thanks for the explanation. That makes sense.
After reading the study and a couple of additional articles, this is what I is what I understand.
If a person's brain is injured his or her level of consciousness may be impaired. The levels of impaired awareness are:
A person in a 'vegetative state' can no longer reason, think, recognize the presence of loved ones, or feel emotions or discomfort. If this state lasts more than four weeks, it is called a 'persistent vegetative state.'
Minimally conscious patients may show a very small awareness of themselves and their surroundings and may feel pain.
Now, to the study, and it's a doozy.
The researchers studied 38 people - 8 healthy adults and 30 patients who were either in a persistent vegetative state or minimally conscious.
Test results for nine of the thirty impaired patients were tossed out due to "excessive noise artefact." Results were analyzed from the healthy adults, from 9 patients in a persistent vegetative state, and from 12 minimally conscious patients. That's a total of 29 total test subjects.
Subjects were wired to special EEG machines and fitted with headphones. The researchers then played 90-second blocks of random monosyllabic words such as "moss, stone, house" with "yes" and "no" randomly included. The random-word test was repeated twenty times for each subject. For each test, the subject would be told either to count the times "yes" was said, or the times the word "no" was said. If "yes" was the target word, the researchers looked at the subject's EEG reaction to the word "no." If "no" was the target, EEG reaction to the word "yes" was examined.
EEG results of the impaired patients were compared to the EEG results of the eight 'healthy' patients.
In the experiment, ONE subject in a persistent vegetative state experienced a similar EEG reaction to the yes/no test as did the healthy subjects. She was young, had only been in a PVS for fifth months, and had minimal brain damage.
Three minimally conscious subjects reacted to novel words said during the test, but not to the yes/no directions.
Subjects were then asked to imagine a tennis game being played. One singular PVS/MC subject demostrated EEG results similar to the healthy subjects. It was the same young lady who had reacted to the yes/no test.
I greatly simplified this explanation, because I didn't fully understand elements such as the statistically compared single-subject reference-free magnitudes of electrical potential over the head of the grand averaged event-related potentials elicited by explicit targets in healthy volunteers, all as a function of time, within the 100–400 ms frontal P3a window and the 400–700 ms parietal P3b window to the − 300–0 ms baseline window using a non-parametric randomisation test. I admit my attempt to understand what that means was rather brief.
If you know, then I'd appreciate you explaining it to me as if I were a five year old.
What makes them happy also makes clear their game, doesn’t it.
Well lets be truthful...there is a group on people in this world that wants it depopulate for various reason..
Whatever the motivation . . . social control is the "hidden" objective.
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