Celeste Biever reports that brain scientists have discovered with functional MRIs that up to 40 percent of people diagnosed as comatose aren’t. They’re paralized, and thus trapped in their bodies, feel pain, and can learn.
It’s never going to be easy to detect consciousness – but by raising awareness of the problem, and exploring a variety of consciousness signatures based on behavioural tests and brain scans – hopefully we can start “unlocking” more people like Houben.
She cites the case of Rom Houben. For over 20 years, doctors thought Rom Houben was brain dead. But then, neurologist Steven Laureys discovered that the Belgian was very much awake. Experts say that up to 40 percent of those thought to be in a persistent vegetative state are, in fact, quite conscious.
Interestingly, in the early 1990s under the Federal right of students with disabilities to attend regular schools, an Illinois judge ordered a school district to accept and teach a student diagnosed comatose in regular daily public high school to which he would have attended as a non-disabled student. Someone wheeled his gurney from classroom to classroom. The judge’s ruling now seems prescient.
Biever, C. How to ‘unlock’ the brains of coma patients.
Dworschak, M. Rom Houben Story