40% of coma patients in a 'vegetative state' may be misdiagnosed.
Ttrapped inside their own bodies, apparently switched off to the world, but still alive: they are the undead.
Adrian Owen’s first experiment on Kate involved presenting her with photographs of her mother and father, followed by fuzzy, meaningless pictures, while her brain was being scanned. “We found,” he says, “that areas of Kate’s brain burst into activity when pics of her family were shown that accorded perfectly with the brain locations of healthy volunteers doing the same task.”
This did not necessarily mean that she was fully conscious. It has been established by David Menon’s research that an anaesthetised patient’s brain can respond to certain stimuli without being actually aware. But Owen’s first experiment revealed that Kate’s brain was not entirely devastated: there were islands of activation. In fact, Kate has no memory now of seeing the pictures. And as she returned to consciousness, she remembers people speaking without understanding what they were saying. The first words she understood as meaningful words, and not just noise, were spoken by her mother. Kate remained in hospital for a further six months, returning gradually to responsiveness in fits and starts. The scan had given her parents and the medical staff confidence that her brain might begin to heal itself slowly with systematic stimuli. They were right.