"Vegetative State" Patients Can Communicate 347
Kittenman writes "The BBC is carrying a story about researchers in the UK and Belgium who can detect the thinking processes within a patient previously thought to be in a vegetative state. The researchers ask the patient verbally to think in certain ways to indicate a 'yes', in other ways to indicate a 'no' — and have successfully communicated with 4 out of 23 patients previously thought to be in a coma."
Horrible news (Score:5, Funny)
It's not that big of a deal... (Score:4, Funny)
Us vegetative types have been doing that for years on World of Warcraft.
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Hell, I was thinking more along terms of my current management.
Summary wrong: Not a coma! (Score:5, Informative)
From TFA:
"Patients in a vegetative state are awake, not in a coma, but have no awareness because of severe brain damage. "
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The WSJ gave more details:
"Researchers at two centers, in England and Belgium, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) tests on 54 patients with severe brain injury. Of these patients, 31 were diagnosed as being in a minimally conscious state, meaning they showed intermittent signs of awareness such as laughing or crying. The other 23 were diagnosed as being in a vegetative state, meaning they were considered unresponsive and unaware of their surroundings."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405 [wsj.com]
Re:Summary wrong: Not a coma! (Score:5, Informative)
Considering that Schiavo had no cerebral cortex, it's pretty much a given that she had no awareness. The article doesn't say all patients in a vegetative state are aware, just that some are, or more to the point, have been misdiagnosed.
Re:Summary wrong: Not a coma! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm holding out for there being some consciousness in the medulla oblongata, held down and suppressed by the tyranny of the cerebral cortex.
Finally free, the medulla oblongata rejoices that now it is the dominant force of consciousness and now it will get to make all the decisions.
Only then it discovers it still can't do anything but make the body breath, pump blood, and occasionally barf.
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You mean Los Angeles?
Re:Summary wrong: Not a coma! (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering that Schiavo had no cerebral cortex, it's pretty much a given that she had no awareness. The article doesn't say all patients in a vegetative state are aware, just that some are, or more to the point, have been misdiagnosed.
If that's the case then at least kill her in the chance that we were wrong and she was conscious. No point in making someone starve.
But nobody had the balls to do this...
Re:Summary wrong: Not a coma! (Score:4, Insightful)
If that's the case then at least kill her in the chance that we were wrong and she was conscious.
I don't care about that "if". Either way, if you're going to remove the feeding tube and effectively kill her, then have the balls to actually do it and kill her. This bullshit rationalization they used, like "Oh we're not killing her, we're only removing what keeps her alive! So if she doesn't miraculously recover and starves to death, that's just God's will!" was a coward's way out. Fuck that bullshit.
Study only applies to focal brain injury (Score:5, Informative)
Of the 54 patients examined in the study most had suffered either from traumatic brain injury or anoxic brain injury. Anoxic brain injury for the most part means your heart had stopped for a prolonged period of time (although other things such as severe prolonged hypoglycemia or carbon monoxide can do the same thing). Anoxic brain injury is a diffuse process and its course is highly predictable. Depending on the severity of the initial event with anoxia patients will either improve after a relatively short period of time or they never will. Of all of the 'miracle' re-awaking cases that have occurred (extremely rare cases of people waking up to a severely disabled state) none of them have been by someone who has suffered anoxia.
Traumatic brain injury has a less predictable course as some of the parts of the brain are destroyed while other parts can be relatively undamaged. Of the five patients in the study who were found with some brain activity all of them were traumatic brain injury cases.
Schiavo suffered anoxic brain injury due to cardiac arrest. These patients never need fancy brains scan as their external findings accurately reflect what has happened to their entire brain. The current New England Journal of Medicine article actually serves to support that anoxia patients have no cognition.
Re: Summary wrong: Not a coma! (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering that Schiavo had no cerebral cortex, it's pretty much a given that she had no awareness.
Given that most of Schiavo's "supporters" think awareness is caused by souls rather than brains, I don't think facts about her condition are going to have much influence on their views.
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Considering that Schiavo had no cerebral cortex, it's pretty much a given that she had no awareness.
Given that most of Schiavo's "supporters" think awareness is caused by souls rather than brains, I don't think facts about her condition are going to have much influence on their views.
Strawman much?
Boy, I bet you now feel so much better about a decision that resulted in starving a living human being to death now that you got a gratuitous bash against religion in. Why, you're so superior to "them".
I'd really love to see the response of all the people who wanted to pull the plug on Schiavo if Florida decided it would be OK to conduct executions by starvation.
Re:Summary wrong: Not a coma! (Score:5, Informative)
More importantly, she was put in a MRI scanner and there was nothing there..
http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2005/03/20/regarding-the-cat-scan-of-terri-schiavos-brain/ [amptoons.com]
However, her situation was only one of the possible PVS states people can end up in..
I can only hope that -all- PVS patients get such a scan before anything is disconnected, and if there is a brain left they then get an active MRI scan to see if they are actually thinking. While it may not have saved Terri I'm pretty sure it will save some others.
Oh; and I really worry about decisions made before active MRI and other techniques came about, I think some horrible things have happened.
CORRECTON CAT not MRI (Score:2)
It was a CAT scan, not MRI, and certainly not active MRI.
- But I'm afraid that even 'just' a CAT scan can show whether brain tissue is present, and it wasnt.
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Oh; and I really worry about decisions made before active MRI and other techniques came about, I think some horrible things have happened.
I'd say that's pretty much a given. What's worse, being effectively paralyzed with no means of communication at all (until now) for years and years, or starving to death for a few weeks? Sounds horrible either way.
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Oh; and I really worry about decisions made before active MRI and other techniques came about, I think some horrible things have happened.
That's an unavoidable side-effect of progress. Think about how many lives were lost to trivial (nowadays) deseases. How many lost due to lack of basic resuscitation. How many are lost currently due to such trivial stuff as decapitation or lack of heart and brain activity for a pitifuly short periods of time.
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Oh; and I really worry about decisions made before active MRI and other techniques came about, I think some horrible things have happened.
Indeed. It makes you wonder if people who were previously misdiagnosed as PVS but really had locked-in syndrome [wikipedia.org] had the "plug pulled" on them.
Of course, though, Terry Schiavo was not one of those people.
Re:Summary wrong: Not a coma! (Score:4, Interesting)
Lots of horrible things happened. Insides of coffins from the earlier centuries were found to have scratch marks from the people inside waking up. Many declared dead were not dead but simply very sick. etc....
Honestly, How would you like to be incapacitated but aware and thrown onto a pyre... Yay! my last moments are insane amounts of agony as I am burned to death.
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Lots of horrible things happened. Insides of coffins from the earlier centuries were found to have scratch marks from the people inside waking up
That doesn't count: they (the bodies inside those coffins) turned out to be zombies or vampires, all defective and thus unable to reach the surface. Unlike Uma Thurman, who got out just fine...
Re:Summary wrong: Not a coma! (Score:5, Insightful)
If I was in a permanent vegetative state I would love it if someone disconnected me, especially if I was conscious. Being awake in what is essentially a dead body sounds like a small slice of hell to me.
While it may not have saved Terri I'm pretty sure it will save some others.
Save them from what? A life where they are completely dependent on machines to keep them alive (being nothing more than a burden to their families), a life where they can't communicate or do any of the things that they love? I have a hard time picturing anyone who being forced to be in this state would find this saved. Hell, even if your religious or personal views accept the "alive at any cost" value, you can't change your mind and tell them to shut down the machines.
I feel no sympathy for the people in a permanent vegative state who lost their lives before the advent of this technology, I feel more sorry for the ones who didn't.
Yes, living wills, and informing your loved ones to remove you from life support in such cases are very important. But as the Schivo case proved, it doesn't really matter when religious politics become involved. Your living will is only as valid as the willingness of your relatives to honor it.
Re:Summary wrong: Not a coma! (Score:4, Interesting)
Save them from the end, death.
I was just thinking about this the other day. If I'm still mentally capable but unable to communicate or move, I think I still want to live.
I like to think and contemplate, which if I was still capable of doing so, I'd like to continue that rather than die. It'd be great if I could 'think' and then tell people, but I'd rather think and not tell people that to just be gone.
Its possible a solution could come in the future, and either way I have time to work on ascension. ;)
You're really look at it from the perspective of people surrounding the person on life support. Making it easier on everyone else, under the guise of being for the PVS person. This is clear from your lack of sympathy for those that may have been wrongly diagnosed. I understand being selfish, its natural, which is why I'd rather be kept alive. I'm selfish and want every opportunity I can possibly get to resolve the issue some way other than my death, even if its hard on my family.
Re:Summary wrong: Not a coma! (Score:4, Insightful)
I like to think and contemplate, which if I was still capable of doing so, I'd like to continue that rather than die.
Really? Then you're not really thinking it through. You want to continue living? When you can't move. When you can't adjust the bedclothes that you're put under, even when you're roasting or freezing. When you can't feed yourself and the liquid nutrient they feed you gives you unbearable heartburn because you're not elevated enough. When you can't scratch that itch - for hours. When the cramps because your arm is in the wrong position continues for hours. When the bedsores burn. When you have no actual data input other than the Oxygen network that your aide has tuned your TV to. When you can't actually see the screen, but can only hear the voices drone on hour after hour (because they didn't prop your head in the right direction). When you go slowly mad, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day, year after year. Yes... sounds lovely. Hope you enjoy your stay in Hell. Glad I don't need to make that choice.
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You're really look at it from the perspective of people surrounding the person on life support. Making it easier on everyone else, under the guise of being for the PVS person. This is clear from your lack of sympathy for those that may have been wrongly diagnosed. I understand being selfish, its natural, which is why I'd rather be kept alive. I'm selfish and want every opportunity I can possibly get to resolve the issue some way other than my death, even if its hard on my family.
Putting myself in the shoes
Please Mod Parent UnInformative (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, living wills, and informing your loved ones to remove you from life support in such cases are very important. But as the Schivo case proved, it doesn't really matter when religious politics become involved. Your living will is only as valid as the willingness of your relatives to honor it.
Schiavo did NOT have a living will, which was the cause of the interminable legal wrangling. Had she clearly designated someone to exercise medical power of attorney, there would have been no controversy. Instead, the Florida default rules it fell to her husband who claimed that she had orally represented to him that she did not want to be kept alive in such a case. Her parents claimed that she would not have, given her religious faith. "Religious politics" had nothing to do with it. Quoting Wikipedia (my emphasis)
Given the lack of a living will, a trial was held during the week of January 24, 2000, to determine what Schiavo's wishes would have been regarding life-prolonging procedures. Testimony from eighteen witnesses regarding her medical condition and her end-of-life wishes was heard. Michael claimed that Schiavo would not want to be kept on a machine where her chance for recovery was minuscule, her parents claimed that Schiavo was a devout Roman Catholic who would not wish to violate the Church's teachings on euthanasia by refusing nutrition and hydration.
Honestly, the case really boils down to that -- who do we believe is best qualified to take an essentially random guess about what a person would want. Ideologues on both sides tried to make it into more than that but it just wasn't. If she was genuinely religious and would have wanted to be kept alive, we should have kept her alive. If she would have wanted to die, we should have let her die. The resolution of this essentially factual question (in the absence of any reliable evidence) neatly solves the entire affair.
To summarize, if we can learn anything from the whole shitfest, please leave notarized documentation of your desires. Not even for yourself (although that should be motivation enough) but so your loved ones can feel confident in your wishes instead of being forced to guess. That is not a burden I would wish on the people that care about me, nor do I think it's fair to give them that responsibility. The document does not have to be complicated or expensive -- it can be as simple as designating a person to chose for you.
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If this were available to you in that state, you could consent to the disconnect.
I doubt it. If you had enough cognitive thought to ask to be disconnected, it would likely be argued that you were asking for assisted suicide. Which sadly is not legal.
Today, you would probably have more luck getting disconnected if you just ignored the questions and pretended to be dead.
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And that is your choice...
Though what happens when the money runs out?
I ask out of genuine curiosity.
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While it may not have saved Terri I'm pretty sure it will save some others.
Save them from what? I'm pretty sure living out the rest of your life unable to move, communicating only through blinks would be worse than the alternative.
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RTFA moron [nytimes.com]. They specifically mentioned her as a case where this does not apply:
The new report, posted online by The New England Journal of Medicine, does not suggest that most apparently unresponsive patients can communicate or are likely to recover. The hidden ability displayed by the young accident victim is rare, the study suggested.
Nor does the finding apply to victims of severe oxygen depletion, like Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman who became unresponsive after her heart stopped and who was taken off
Confusion of terms (Score:5, Insightful)
A vegetative state is by definition where there is no detectable awareness. You could legitimately say that they were "previously thought to be in a vegetative state," but if you detect awareness then they are in a coma.
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A vegetative state is by definition where there is no detectable awareness. You could legitimately say that they were "previously thought to be in a vegetative state," but if you detect awareness then they are in a coma.
A persistent vegetative state is a condition of patients with severe brain damage who were in a coma, but then progressed to a state of wakefulness without detectable awareness. [wikipedia.org]
Vegetative > coma > dead.
Terrible fear (Score:3, Insightful)
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This is one of those terrible fears. It's great that they have found a way to communicate with someone in this state, but at the same time this type of story makes me ponder how horrific that must be for the person.
Practice those lucid dreams.
Re:Terrible fear (Score:5, Funny)
Especially if a land mine has taken your sight, taken your speech, taken your hearing, taken your arms, taken your legs, taken your soul, and left you with life in hell.
Re:Terrible fear (Score:5, Funny)
Ode to the lameness filter:
I know, dear Filter, that using so many caps is like yelling
When quoting Metallica, though, yelling is okay
My mother taught me never to yell at people
But she also said that it's okay if you have a loud guitar
Incidentally, she didn't teach me how
To write an ode.
Re:Terrible fear (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yeah, straight out of World War 1, and Johnny Got His Gun [wikipedia.org]
Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what the Next X-Prize is for (Score:2)
The ultimate use for a brain-computer interface:
http://slashdot.org/story/10/02/03/1722200/Next-X-Prize-mdash-10M-For-a-Brain-Computer-Interface [slashdot.org]
So it isn't pointless to keep your loved-one around, with the real hope of future technical developments letting them interact with society again.
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- What does it say? - "Kill me." Over and over again. It says, "Kill me."
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And what would they probably say? "Kill me...."
That would be tremendously useful information.
4 out of 23? (Score:2)
have successfully communicated with 4 out of 23 patients previously thought to be in a coma.
That's actually a better return than I get on security surveys sent to faculty...
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Not to mention replies to résumés.
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This post could use a +1 Depressingly unemployed.
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If you're only sending out 23 surveys you need to take a remedial statistics course. And actually an almost 25% return rate is very good for any survey. Most folks are lucky to get a 10% return.
Re:4 out of 23? (Score:4, Funny)
If you're only sending out 23 surveys you need to take a remedial statistics course. And actually an almost 25% return rate is very good for any survey. Most folks are lucky to get a 10% return.
What if you only have 23 faculty members?
Damn, you know last night I asked my wife how her day was. What a fool I was. How could I ever get valid results with such a small sample pool.
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Asking your wife how her day was was hardly a sample. If there are onlt 23 faculty members, why do you even need a survey?
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False Positive (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:False Positive (Score:5, Informative)
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> How can we assume that the patient, who by definition has brain damage, is capable of understanding the question correctly and answering correctly?
That one seems rather easy, you ask them many questions and see how many of the answers make any sense. If a large part of them make sense, it is a reasonable to conclude the patient understood and was able to answer. Of course this would disqualify patients who are able to understand the question but unable to answer, and those who would be able to answer b
Re:False Positive (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think they addressed the "no answer" vs. "B", however, they did assess the patients' ability to answer a series of factual questions about the patient's life prior to whatever put them where they were - I think that pretty much shows that there is something non-spurious being measured here and it's not just the dead salmon fMRI effect as another reply suggested - the probability of random readings matching up with the correct answers to a series of such questions seems very minute.
And 4 out of 23 is not a success rate - it's a misdiagnosis rate! Nobody in their right mind is claiming that *all* patients in persistent vegetative states have meaningful cognition occurring (except the EXTREMELY inaccurate and misleading Slashdot article title). Rather, some patients who failed the standard tests to assess consciousness levels are perhaps more conscious than was previously detectable.
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Just ask a long enough series of questions, randomize them so that you aren't asking them in a way to expect any sort of pattern in the responses.
Is your name John Smith? Expect yes
Did you attend wrong school name? Expect no
Did you get married?
Did you have any children?
Did you have 1 child
Did you have 2 children.
Was your mother's name...
And so on.
You can look into the rate at which your 'yes' or 'no' indicators happen. If it is him moving his thumb, when not being asked questions, or when being stimulate
Re:False Positive (Score:4, Informative)
The scanning was done in a fashion that is typical of fMRI studies in that an active condition was alternated with a rest condition. In fMRI it's essentially impossible to get a meaningful activation without contrasting two different conditions, in this case Answer with Relax, so the "activation" that is measured is a comparison between the answer and relax conditions. If a subject just had continuous spurious activation in the target brain region: 1) it wouldn't have been identified in the localizer task (described briefly below) and 2) it wouldn't show up as a differential activation between the Answer and Relax periods.
The subjects first underwent a "localizer" task to determine what particular region of the motor cortex to use for their responses. They alternated periods of mental imagery (imagining playing tennis, and imagining navigating through a familiar city) with relax. This identified the regions that would later be used to indicate Yes or No responses (one type of imagery for yes, the other for no).
They asked true/false questions while monitoring (Score:2)
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So you remember everything about your life, especially after having brain trauma? That's pretty fucking impressive.
I'm not saying that it definitely is one way or the other. I'm just looking at probabilities.
They would have had to choose very simple, easy to answer questions, partly because they were questioning a brain-damaged individual, but also partly because they had to choose questions that they also knew the answers to. So, the questions would likely be things like "Is your name Bob?", and "Are you male?" and "Were you born in London?". While it is entirely possible that brain trauma could cause a person to forge
Coma, not in a hollywood way. (Score:5, Informative)
This is not really surprising if you are aware what a real coma is. There is a lot of states between fully consciousness and complete unconsciousness. In movies, and in soaps you switch between those states in a surprise wake-up. In reality this is much more complex.
Anyway, better diagnosis is needed to prevent accidents like Brain scan finds man was not in a coma--23 years later [cnet.com] and other possible improvements in brain damage treatment.
Re:Coma, not in a hollywood way. (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, but that man in the coma for 23 years, is only "communicating" with the world through "facilitated communication", which is a hoax. A discredited technique.
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If you're only sending out 23 surveys you need to take a remedial statistics course. And actually an almost 25% return rate is very good for any survey. Most folks are lucky to get a 10% return.
Yet he was also shown to be able to answer yes/no questions by moving his foot. What you are referring to is facilitated communication and while THAT is dubious, I think a lot of the people here are jumping on the hoax bandwagon without really understanding the situation.
Re:Coma, not in a hollywood way. (Score:4, Informative)
The keyboard awas assisted by someone else. In fact, he doesn't even look at the keyboard and gts the expected answers.
Give him people that don't speak the same language to assist.
Here is a nice look at the story:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=2838 [sciencebasedmedicine.org]
Re: Coma, not in a hollywood way. (Score:2)
This is not really surprising if you are aware what a real coma is. There is a lot of states between fully consciousness and complete unconsciousness. In movies, and in soaps you switch between those states in a surprise wake-up. In reality this is much more complex.
FWIW, there was a nice article for non-experts about this in Scientific American a couple of years ago.
Euthanasia (Score:5, Insightful)
> It does raise many ethical issues - for example - it is lawful to allow patients in a permanent vegetative state to die by withdrawing all treatment, but if a patient showed they could respond it would not be, even if they made it clear that was what they wanted.
It seems kinda silly that you're only allowed to die when you're unable to make that decision. To me it seems cruel to keep someone alive in a vegetative state just because they have enough of their conciousness left to want to end it. Yay for legalized euthanasia in the Netherlands.
Re:Euthanasia (Score:5, Insightful)
Doctor: "Well, thanks to recent breakthroughs we may be able to ask him directly. Lets just get him into this MRI..."
Doctor: "The results are clear, we were able to communicate with him and he was very adamant about stopping all treatment. He clearly does not want to live out his remaining days in this state, and I don't think anyone could blame him for that."
Relative: "If that's his wish then yes, lets stop all treatment."
Doctor: "I'm sorry m'aam, but that's no longer an option..."
It may have been funny if it weren't so sad...
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Mod me a troll if you like, but I speak from experience. My wife used to work in emergency rooms. There was more than one occasion where people who were not quite brain dead were taken for organ harvesting. She was so disturbed that she never does organ donor cards now.
Never mod someone -1 Troll simply because you disagree with the politics.
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Hopefully this'll be available outside of the UK but this is Terry Pratchett giving a lecture on his Alzheimers and legalised euthanasia from a few days ago: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qmfgn [bbc.co.uk]. Guardian article covering the same subject here http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/feb/02/terry-pratchett-assisted-suicide-tribunal [guardian.co.uk]
Pratchett has done alot to provoke intelligent debate on assisted suicide and related matters, thankfully without much in the way of people shouting him down - I'm a firm believ
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I think we've come full circle
"for the last five years of my life, forgotten by and an embarrassment to my friends and family is my idea of hell."
back to the World of Warcraft player.
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I've actually never understood this attitude about wanting to end everything. Yeah, granted, life would suck compared to what it could have been, but on the other hand, if you die, you are GONE FOREVER. There is nothing on the other side. You simply cease to exist, and it's as if you had never existed. All your consciousness is gone.
I can see wanting to check out if you're in constant pain and will never recover, but if you have your thoughts, you can at least think and have some hope of someday recovering.
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If there's nothing but oblivion, then you might well have never existed. Oblivion isn't some old folk's home where you can reflect on your life. Your thoughts, memories, experiences: *poof* gone. Whatever contributions you've made to the world will be forgotten in short-order, and history has shown everyone will be forgotten COMPLETELY in time.
All that is exactly correct. There is no point to my existence, any more than there was a point to some guy that lived 15,000 years ago who lived and died in Africa
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There is nothing on the other side. You simply cease to exist, and it's as if you had never existed. All your consciousness is gone. [...] Assuming that is true is as irrational as assuming the opposite.
Untrue. There is plenty of evidence for a mechanistic brain (i.e., cognitive malfunctions from brain damage. Read the great books by Oliver Sacks on odd neurological problems), and absolutely zero evidence for a "soul" or any sort of afterlife. Like everyone, I wish there was some sort of way to "go on", b
Vegetative patients say (Score:5, Funny)
"Eat me, I'm nutritious."
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I thought they'd say "Aaah! Aaah! Put me back in the grooooound!"
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Soylent Green is PEOPLE!!
Cal me skeptical... (Score:2)
On the other hand, fMRI studies also find dead salmon do a lot of thinking [wired.com]. The whole fMRI field suffers from what we'll generously call "Statistical Issues," and until we get better handle on it, I'm going to remain somewhat dubious about fMRI studies that claim to be able to detect this or that. 4/27 is not a stel
Take a closer look (Score:5, Insightful)
5 of 54 patients who underwent this procedure. Showed a possible response.
3 of those 5 it turned out showed awareness to normal stimuli and were either mislabeled by doctors, or their condition changed.
So basically that leaves 2 patients out of 51 seeming to "be able to modulate their brain activity". And only ONE of those was able to "correctly answer 5 of 6 yes/no questions"
This could be legit, but there is also PLENTY of room for statistical chance to have created this "result".
The bottom line is that too much of a big deal is being made out of a tiny kernel of good data in a mountain of null results.
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3 of those 5 it turned out showed awareness to normal stimuli and were either mislabeled by doctors, or their condition changed.
That's scary. I'm glad they underwent this procedure which in turn showed they actually were aware to normal stimuli.
Not "facilitated communication" (Score:2)
My first thought on reading the slashdot summary was "Not this again..." because there was a recent Belgian case of a man who was supposedly in a coma for 20+ years and was now communicating with the help of a woman. And it was total bull.
This does appear to be something different, though I imagine it may get confused with the known pseudoscience of facilitated communication.
One beep for "yes", two for "no" (Score:5, Funny)
Fry: "BEEP!"
Zap: "'Yes.' Ok. And, are you guilty!?"
Fry: "BEEP! BEEP!"
Zap: "Double 'Yes'!"
Sorry -- too lazy to dig for the exact quote.
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Not to ruin the funny but I was horribly bored so here goes ...
ZAP: Philip J. Fry, you stand accused of travelling to the forbidden planet Omega 3. A crime punishable by 12 concurrent death sentences. Do you understand the charges? ...
KIF; One beep for yes, two beeps for no.
FRY: *BEEP*
ZAP: Yes. So noted. You pleed guilty?
FRY: *BEEP* *BEEP*
ZAP: Double Yes. Guilty. I will now carry out the sentence
It's the first minute and a half or so from the episode "Where no fan has gone before" if someone is wondering.
fMRI is not perfect (Score:5, Interesting)
If you haven't check out this study [wired.com] publicized in Wired, where they detected human emotion activity in the brain of a salmon. A dead salmon.
Just because the fMRI shows some colors, that doesn't necessarily mean that there's really cognition going on. It could just be false detections from imperfect scanning, or it could be scientists seeing patterns in data that don't really exist, or it could be the result of our imperfect understanding of how the brain works, or a whole slew of other things.
This is made worse by things like the Houben case [sciencebasedmedicine.org], which used Facilitated Communication to "prove" that Houben had an intact consciousness. FC hasn't passed any rigorous scientific study (i.e. blind tests to prevent the facilitator's motivations/desires from modifying the results), but stories like Houben cause those with loved ones with sever brain damage in PVS to start clamoring that there may still be hope. James Randi has written about FC [randi.org], and the Houben case in particular.
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book and movie "Johnny get your gun" (Score:3, Interesting)
Curious Choice of Tasks (Score:2)
FTA: The team told him to use "motor" imagery like a tennis match to indicate "yes" and "spatial" imagery like thinking about roaming the streets for a "no".
I've done a little bit of research in the area of spatial vs motor visualization. I think they could have chosen a better discriminator for the "spatial" task - it could be that the physical act of "wandering the streets" could be confounded with "playing tennis". There are many more tasks that I believe would have tapped into a more pure mea
Interesting Article (Score:2)
OTOH, is a vegetative state someone with consciousness or simply brain injured enough not to be able to respond?
Come on, Dr Brewer... (Score:2)
prot's been telling us that for years.
Locked-in syndrome, a skeptic's take: (Score:2, Informative)
Try:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=3122 [sciencebasedmedicine.org]
for a critical point of view.
What if Steven Hawking finally slipped away? (Score:2)
One day I thought, "What if one day Steven Hawking had the most blinding insightful revelation anyone has ever had, but it was just after all his muscle control was lost?"
So I wrote this. (Disclaimer: No physicists were actually harmed in the writing of this play.)
http://www.scribd.com/doc/19550880/GUT-The-Grand-Unified-Theory-A-oneact-play-with-seven-blackouts [scribd.com]
Correction: SOME (Score:2)
Some patients, appearing to be in a vegetative state, are in fact capable of a form of communication.
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You don't have to answer. Of course, then they might turn the life support off, so not without its advantages...
Fix'd
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Yes, and they made sure that the horrible vagetative serial rapist will spend plenty of time in the state prison!
You have been found punworthy (Score:2, Funny)
You mean the cereal rapist will spend time in Vegetative State Penitentiary.
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Somewhat different, the man suffered from Locked-In Syndrome, which can look like a coma or vegetative state but is in fact different. Ussually people who are locked-in have control over their eye movements and blinking, but very little else. It is through eye movements that they can often communicate, abliet very slowly. One person, Jean-Dominique Bauby, was actually able to write a book about the experience of being locked in: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which was later made into a movie of the
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Maybe you are missing the part where the expected rate is 0%.