Friday, September 15, 2006

Buried alive in your own skull. By William Saletan - Slate Magazine (click)

"Five days ago, Science published a report on a young woman devastated by a car crash in England. For five months after the accident, tests showed no signs of awareness. Doctors declared her vegetative. Then, scientists put her in a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging scanner, which tracks blood flow to different parts of the brain. They asked her to imagine playing tennis and walking through her home. The scan lit up with telltale patterns of language, movement, and navigation indistinguishable from the brains of healthy people.
Something was awake inside that woman's skull. Without the scanner, no one but her would have known."

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