Waking the dead? Deep coma victims will be able to talk and move around one day, one of Britain’s top neuroscientists has claimed.
Adrian Owen of the Cambridge University has already shown, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, that some victims who show no outward signs of awareness, cannot only comprehend what people are saying, but also answer simple questions.
Now, he and his team have gone a step further and shown that a similar response can be achieved using a much cheaper and smaller Electroencephalography (EEG) machine which measures electrical activity in the brain.
Dr Owen believes the new devices could be available within 10 years.
“I would never have believed that within a few years we would be actually communicating with a patient who was in a persistent vegetative state. We have seen something that is quite extraordinary. We now have a moral and ethical obligation to find ways for them to communicate properly. We cannot be putting them in a fMRI scanner every time they want to communicate. It is very expensive and not portable and not available everywhere. EEG could work as well and it’s cheaper and portable. I feel it will be possible for people to steer wheelchairs and be able to communicate,” The Daily Telegraph quoted him as saying.
Dr Owen laid the foundation for his prediction after studying a 29-year-old man brain-damaged in a car crash in 2003. The man was in a coma for two years before slipping into a persistent vegetative state.
He was seemingly awake, occasionally blinked, but showed no other sign of being aware of the outside world. But Dr Owen’s team and Steven Laureys of University of Liege, discovered it was possible to talk to him by tapping into his brain activity.