Vegetative Patients Can Still Learn

enigma48 writes to mention that a collaborative study between the Universities of Buenos Aires and Cambridge have demonstrated that individuals in a vegetative state can still learn and demonstrate at least a partial consciousness. Their findings are reported in a recent online edition of Nature Neuroscience. "It is the first time that scientists have tested whether patients in vegetative and minimally conscious states can learn. By establishing that they can, it is believed that this simple test will enable practitioners to assess the patient's consciousness without the need of imaging. The abstract is also available in the advance issue of Nature."

Re:fMRI Strikes Again

[TheRealMindChild]

Reminds me of that fatal birth defect where a kid is born without the top of their skull so it doesn't form all of the brain, but enough for them to cry, smile, etc and causes people serious emotional stress because it appears to be cognition when it's not.
 
It breaks my heart just thinking about being in that situation. To love someone so much and for you to find out that they can't love you back... and what you thought were the most special moments of your life were all a lie.

Is it worth it?

[vehicle tracking]

My guess is that we will spend millions of dollars studying this. I really don't understand why someone would want to be kept alive for years because they may learn something. I can only imagine they will learn how it sucks to be kept alive by machines. How do we know they are not experiencing a lot of pain?

Frist

[WindBourne]

More likely than not, ppl like Frist will claim that this is proof of why he was right about Schiavo.

Re:fMRI Strikes Again

[poetmatt]

Well, I can understand the emotional distress, but the value of a birth is what people choose to put into it, same as abortion.

The can't love back part, well, many people have had relationships like that. I mean Zooey Deschanel and Jennifer Love Hewitt still don't respond to my love letters and the requests for them to bear my children.

Re:fMRI Strikes Again

[jollyreaper]

It breaks my heart just thinking about being in that situation. To love someone so much and for you to find out that they can't love you back... and what you thought were the most special moments of your life were all a lie.

Happens all the time. At least someone who's missing a brain has an excuse for it.

Re:Is it worth it?

[sonnejw0]

Your instincts about the issue are right on. These learning processes for aversive stimuli can actually only be used to judge which regions of the brain are intact and thus make a diagnosis about a possible recovery. It's a quality issue, and these kinds of examination procedures being developed in this article will help loved ones make judgment calls.

Legal ramifications

[electricprof]

Of course the Schiavo case is the first to come to mind, but doesn't it seem that the term "persistent vegetative state" is becoming less well defined? It seems that survivors making end of life decisions for loved ones have to deal with very murky information.

Re:fMRI Strikes Again

[tibman]

You can love a child that you know for a fact isn't yours. There is a choice involved. Babies found in dumpsters probably prove that.

The Reflex

[scorp1us]

This isn't cognition, but rather reflexive. The brain is an organic computer and it is supreme at pattern recognition. This would be only a tad higher than keeping the heart beating and other involuntary actions. Just because it is conditioned doesn't mean there is precognition or reasoning.

I would tastelessly posit that you could program someone (or multiple someones) to preform a rudimentary calculation. If true, then we would have actual wet-ware to program. The question is then, what is the longest program you could condition someone into? We might be able to beat the NP-complete barrier with wetware.

far-fetched

[speedtux]

Sea slugs can learn under classical conditioning; it doesn't require consciousness or even a brain.