Neuroscience
Jerome Groopman has an article in the Oct. 15 issue of the New Yorker. Medical Dispatch: Silent Minds: Reporting & Essays is about consciousness, particularly among those in various degrees of coma. Groopman reports on some fascinating work by the British neuroscientist Adrian Owen, who's used fMRI to demonstrate that some vegetative patients respond to language, some of whom show the "the same response to the sentences as scans of healthy volunteers." Once he and and his colleagues determined that one patient could distinguish language from noise sounds, they conducted tests to see if she would respond to mental imagery: when asked to imagine herself playing tennis, again her fMRI " 'activation [was] indistinguishable from those in the group of normal volunteers' "who had also been asked to imagine themselves playing tennis.
Groopman goes on to report on work that Lionel Naccache, a neurologist at the Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris, is doing to develop a medical definition of consciousness, which includes these three elements:
The article is packed with interesting case studies and some fascinating scientific, ethical, and philosophical questions. A related article in the May 2007 issue of Scientific American by Steven Laureys is interesting because Laureys has done similar work himself. The Sci Am article also points to an interesting book about the medical, ethical, and legal dilemmas raised by these breakthroughs.
For More Information
- Finding Consciousness Within
It’s difficult to imagine anything worse than lying paralysed, being fully aware and yet unable to signal to your loved ones sitting around you that – yes, you can hear them, you are there. If only the doctors could scan your brain and see that you...
- News In Science - Woman In Coma Plays Tennis - 08/09/2006
News in Science - Woman in coma plays tennis - 08/09/2006: "Brain scans of a woman who has been in a vegetative state for five months show her imagining playing tennis and responding to commands, researchers report..." The big question is whether or not...
- Deep Brain Stimulation
A curious case report discussed in today's New York Times: Man Regains Speech After Brain Stimulation By BENEDICT CAREY Published: August 1, 2007 A 38-year-old man who spent more than five years in a mute, barely conscious state as a result of a...
- The Magic Of Consciousnes, Or, Teller Speaks
Interesting article in last week's Times about a recent conference by the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC). George Johnson covered the event, and describes it: "After two days of presentations by scientists and philosophers...
- How Doctors Make Decisions
Interesting article in this week's The New Yorker about how doctors think / make decisions. What's the Trouble, a medical dispatch by Jerome Groopman is subtitled "How Doctors Think." I'd say it's also about how they make decisions, and...
Neuroscience
Signs of Consciousness
Jerome Groopman has an article in the Oct. 15 issue of the New Yorker. Medical Dispatch: Silent Minds: Reporting & Essays is about consciousness, particularly among those in various degrees of coma. Groopman reports on some fascinating work by the British neuroscientist Adrian Owen, who's used fMRI to demonstrate that some vegetative patients respond to language, some of whom show the "the same response to the sentences as scans of healthy volunteers." Once he and and his colleagues determined that one patient could distinguish language from noise sounds, they conducted tests to see if she would respond to mental imagery: when asked to imagine herself playing tennis, again her fMRI " 'activation [was] indistinguishable from those in the group of normal volunteers' "who had also been asked to imagine themselves playing tennis.
Groopman goes on to report on work that Lionel Naccache, a neurologist at the Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris, is doing to develop a medical definition of consciousness, which includes these three elements:
- Ability to report the content of a representation ("I see my cat")
- Ability to sustain this representation over time ("I still see my cat")
- The ability to "broadcast" this information to other areas of the brain. (I think this would mean things like ... "I pet my cat" or "I must feed my cat"). Groopman describes some interesting work Naccache has done to show the importance of broadcasting.
The article is packed with interesting case studies and some fascinating scientific, ethical, and philosophical questions. A related article in the May 2007 issue of Scientific American by Steven Laureys is interesting because Laureys has done similar work himself. The Sci Am article also points to an interesting book about the medical, ethical, and legal dilemmas raised by these breakthroughs.
For More Information
- Davis Matthew, Coleman Martin, Absalom Anthony, et al. Dissociating Speech Perception and Comprehension at Reduced Levels of Awareness. PNAS (the journal of the National Academy of Sciences) October 9, 2007, Vol. 104 no. 41, p. 16032-16037. (abstract only; full-text may be available @ your library)
- Groopman, Jerome. Medical Dispatch: Silent Minds: Reporting & Essays. New Yorker, October 15, 2007 (free online).
- Laureys, Steven. "Eyes Open, Brain Shut." Scientific American, May 2007, p. 86-89. (Full article at Academic Search Premier and other library databases)
- Jennett, Bryan. The Vegetative State: Medical Facts, Ethical and Legal Dilemmas. Cambridge University Press. 2002.
- Owen, Adrian, Coleman, Martin, Boly, Melanie et al. "Detecting Awareness in the Vegetative State." Science. September 8, 2006, Vol. 313. no. 5792, p. 1402. See also the many related commentaries in that issue of Science. (abstract only; full-text may be available @ your library)
- Finding Consciousness Within
It’s difficult to imagine anything worse than lying paralysed, being fully aware and yet unable to signal to your loved ones sitting around you that – yes, you can hear them, you are there. If only the doctors could scan your brain and see that you...
- News In Science - Woman In Coma Plays Tennis - 08/09/2006
News in Science - Woman in coma plays tennis - 08/09/2006: "Brain scans of a woman who has been in a vegetative state for five months show her imagining playing tennis and responding to commands, researchers report..." The big question is whether or not...
- Deep Brain Stimulation
A curious case report discussed in today's New York Times: Man Regains Speech After Brain Stimulation By BENEDICT CAREY Published: August 1, 2007 A 38-year-old man who spent more than five years in a mute, barely conscious state as a result of a...
- The Magic Of Consciousnes, Or, Teller Speaks
Interesting article in last week's Times about a recent conference by the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC). George Johnson covered the event, and describes it: "After two days of presentations by scientists and philosophers...
- How Doctors Make Decisions
Interesting article in this week's The New Yorker about how doctors think / make decisions. What's the Trouble, a medical dispatch by Jerome Groopman is subtitled "How Doctors Think." I'd say it's also about how they make decisions, and...