"Adrian Owen still gets animated when he talks about patient 23. The patient was only 24 years old when his life was devastated by a car accident. Alive but unresponsive, he had been languishing in what neurologists refer to as a vegetative state for five years, when Owen, a neuro-scientist then at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues at the University of Liège in Belgium, put him into a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and started asking him questions. Incredibly, he provided answers."
posted by jquinby on Jun 15, 2012 - 31 comments

"I shall never forget the day when they discovered what was truly wrong with me – it was my second birth. Rom Houbens was simply paralysed and had no way to let doctors caring for him what he was suffering. Only the re-evaluation of his case at the University of Liege brought to light that Houben was only paralysed all these years. Hi-tech scans showed his brain was still functioning almost completely normally.
posted by njbradburn on Nov 23, 2009 - 94 comments

Logically, the last thing you would think would help a person trapped in a persistent vegetative state is a nervous system is sleeping pill. Illogically, when you do, many of them wake up.
posted by eriko on Sep 12, 2006 - 56 comments

Blogger analysis of Terri Schiavo's CAT Scan. Healthy brain. Terri Schiavo's brain.
posted by fandango_matt on Mar 23, 2005 - 105 comments