Posted on 01/17/2015 4:41:55 PM PST by kindred
A few months ago I attended a psychiatry grand rounds at Duke University Hospital on this subject. They were able to communicate with people in a coma using MRIs and brain patterning to elicit responses.
One interesting question raised related to the competency for the individual in a long term coma to answer for themselves.
The research involved performing MRIs on a group of people when they were thinking of standing in place and hitting a tennis ball. They then did the same thing on the group with them imagining running around the tennis court but not hitting the ball.
They compared the two MRI patterns and found definite differences. They then asked the subjects to alternate every 30 seconds between the two thought images and monitored the differences.
Next they asked a question and said that if the answer was “YES” the subject should imagine standing in place hitting a tennis ball and if the answer was “NO”, they should imagine running around the tennis court without hitting the ball.
This yielded definite yes or no MRI pattern responses to questions.
Next they began asking questions to patients in a coma while in an MRI and found they could get “Yes” or “NO” answers from them by reading the MRI pattern.
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