A woman who had suffered severe brain injury in a car accident and was in a vegetative state managed to communicate just by using her thoughts, say scientists from the UK and Belgium. They scanned her brain and discovered that she was able to understand verbal commands - she could even visualize herself playing tennis when verbally triggered to do so by the scientists.You can read about this discovery in the journal Science.The scientists could not say how common this ability might be among other patients who are diagnosed as being in a 'vegetative state'. They added that she might be one in a million, as all vegetative patients are different and have damage to different parts of their brain.FMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) was used to record brain activity in the woman five months after her accident. Doctors had diagnosed her as being in a persistent vegetative state. When a person is in a persistent vegetative state he/she has lost cognitive neurological function and awareness of the environment, but keep non-cognitive neurological function and preserved sleep-wake cycle. In lay terms, it roughly means the person is technically alive but his/her brain is dead.While mapping her brain the scientists asked her to visualize simple tasks.Team leader Dr Adrian Owen, Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, UK said "The tasks we chose are based on many years of brain imaging research that shows different areas of the brain are activated when we perform different kinds of tasks."The scientists were startled to find that her brain patterns, when she was asked to imagine herself playing tennis or moving around her home, displayed the same activated cortical areas in a manner indistinguishable from that of the healthy volunteers.
even if it's in the news, it doesn't necessary mean something is real the media is evil hey, but I do believe it's real :lol:
Yea, well, I don't believe oxygen is what we really breathe!...doesn't mean I'm right... I'd be willing to bet it's real. Our brain is highly complex, and would only make sense that it could picture things. lol
....te he he...AHAHHAHAHAHAHAA....the national news has done nothing more to convey the truth than other news sources...just has more money...and is popular by showing people what they want to see. thats not news, thats entertainment. i seem to have missed the communicating thought part. she could understand verbal commands. and the hole tennis thing makes no sense.....wheres the communicatin thru thought...?
yea i only believe some stuff from the news, the media get there money from views and what gets views, entertainment.
