Communicating With The Comatose

It’s an awful lot like mind-reading:

[Neuroscientists Adrian] Owen and [Steven] Laureys were trying to find a reliable way to communicate with patients in a vegetative state, including Gillian*. In July 2005, this 23-year-old had been crossing a road, chatting on her mobile phone. She was struck by two cars. … Five months later, a strange stroke of serendipity allowed Gillian to unlock her box.

The key arose from a systematic study Owen started with Laureys in 2005. They had asked healthy volunteers to imagine doing different things, such as singing songs or conjuring up the face of their mother. Then Owen had another idea.“I just had a hunch,” he says. “I asked a healthy control to imagine playing tennis. Then I asked her to imagine walking through the rooms of her house.” Imagining tennis activates part of the cortex, called the supplementary motor area, involved in the mental simulation of movements. But imagining walking around the house activates the parahippocampal gyrus in the core of the brain, the posterior parietal lobe, and the lateral premotor cortex. The two patterns of activity were as distinct as a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’. So, if people were asked to imagine tennis for ‘yes’ and walking around the house for ‘no’, they could answer questions via fMRI.

Gazing into Gillian’s ‘vegetative’ brain with the brain scanner, he asked her to imagine the same things – and saw strikingly similar activation patterns to the healthy volunteers. It was an electric moment. Owen could read her mind.