A patient in a seemingly vegetative state, unable to move or speak, showed signs of attentive awareness that had not been detected before, a new study reveals. This patient was able to focus on words signalled by the experimenters as auditory targets as successfully as healthy individuals. If this ability can be developed consistently in certain patients who are vegetative, it could open the door to specialised devices in the future and enable them to interact with the outside world.
The research, by scientists at the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (MRC CBSU) and the University of Cambridge, is published this week in the journal Neuroimage: Clinical.
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Image:This scan depicts patterns of the vegetative patient's electrical activity over the head when they attended to the designated words, and when they when they were distracted by novel but irrelevant words
Credit: Clinical Neurosciences
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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Patient in ‘vegetative state’ not just aware, but paying attention
1 November 2013
New research raises the possibility of devices in the future to help some patients in a vegetative state interact with the outside world.