Willful Modulation of Brain Activity in Vegetables.
There’s a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine that’s causing a stir. 54 patients, all suffering from severe disorders of consciousness (”persistent vegetative state”), were scanned using fMRI while asked questions that generally involve cognition localized to specific areas of the brain. From the LA Times:
Several times when Subject 23 was asked to imagine playing tennis, Monti said, the region of the brain most closely associated with complex motor planning became highly active, and stayed active for 30 seconds after researchers prompted such imagery by saying “tennis.”
Similarly, when researchers asked the patient to imagine walking through the house where he grew up and then said the word “navigate,” Subject No. 23 responded with bursts of activity in the region of the brain involved in constructing and navigating a mental map.
The young, French-speaking man was the only subject who was then trained to answer simple yes or no questions — whether his father’s name was Paul (yes) or Alexander (no), whether he had siblings and how many — using the imagery technique he had already learned.
Checking the patient’s responses for accuracy and comparing them to the yes-no brain responses of a group of healthy volunteers, researchers discerned that Subject No. 23 was not only still “in there,” but capable of purposeful thought and communication.
Clever… in more ways than one.
Sexy fMRI
Pek Van Andel, winner of the Ignobel Prize, gives us the best money shot ever: