Futurehead.com

New research published in the New England Journal of Medicine seems set to revolutionise our medical, legal and ethical understanding of people who had previously been believed to be all but brain-dead – patients in a persistent vegetative state (PVS).

Most health professionals do not recommend further treatment for patients who have spent a year in a vegetative state: official advice is that the chances of recovery are virtually zero, and such patients were believed to have no awareness or meaningful cognition – to be without "thoughts, memories, emotions and intentions of any kind". But now, one patient who had spent seven years showing no signs of consciousness after receiving a traumatic brain injury in a car accident has recently been able to communicate with his medical team by having his thoughts read by an MRI scanner monitoring his brain activity. Asked to imagine playing tennis to signal a positive response, the patient gave the correct answers to a series of "yes or no" questions about his family.

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