FLICKR, ANDY CARLSON
Adrian Owen, a neuroscientist at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, is on a mission to communicate with patients deemed to be in a vegetative state. Over the past decade, he has used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as a sort of interrogation tool—mapping the brain activity of comatose people as he asks them a series of questions. He has found that in a subset of patients thought to be far gone, the brain activity in response to questioning was comparable to what’s observed in healthy people.
In a 2010 study, for example, he used an interrogation technique that consisted of asking a patient in a vegetative state to think of playing tennis if the answer to a question was “yes,” and to ...
