For the topic of my paper I am looking at how bilingual patients with brain damage recover faster than those who are monolingual. While searching through articles I came across an article in the magazine Scientific American Mind, that while it did not necessarily pertain to all aspects of my topic of interest, still grabbed my attention to further read.
This article titled Freeing a (Locked-In) Mind and written by Karen Schrock demonstrated that current studies are being done in which vegetative patients may soon be able to communicate their thoughts. I became immediately interested because it had seemed that until now brain-damaged patients were thought of as “there is nothing we can do”, and there was no way to determine if a patient with brain damage would ever come to or not. It is interesting to think about this because while we have discussed in class the different verbal and non-verbal ways we communicate, we have not discussed the inability to communicate with others, and after reading about these recent studies I thought that more discussion on this topic was worthwhile.
This article explained how we can now detect when somebody is consciously aware. Through new advancements in fMRI scans researchers can see which areas of the brain are most active during thought processes. Adrian Owen of the University of Cambridge discovered that a vegetative patient was indeed conscious when they asked her to imagine herself doing various tasks, such as playing tennis or walking through the rooms of her home, while they scanned her brain using fMRI. They did the same with healthy controls and found that when both the vegetative patient and the healthy controls were asked to perform the task, their brains showed similar activation in motor and spatial navigation areas. Owen then used this same basic principle to devise a protocol for talking to a vegetative patient. If the patient imagined playing tennis, it meant, “yes”. If they imagined walking through the rooms of their home it meant “no”. Through practice on healthy subjects, researchers have learned to tell apart thought-only responses of “yes” and “no” in under a minute, and are now preparing to test this technique on a vegetative patient whom they have already found to be aware. Succeeding would mean that we can “converse” with a lock-in person for the first time ever. I find in amazing that patients will soon be able to communicate without having to say or do anything. This puts a new meaning on the phrase of reading one’s mind.