Fergus Walsh describes, in her BCCNews article “Vegetative Patient Scott Routley says “I’m not in pain’,” an incredible story of a man who was found to be partially conscious when no one thought it was possible. Scott Routley was injured in a car accident nearly 12 years ago with severe brain trauma. He has been bound to a bed and was thought to be in a vegetative state ever since. His family always had the feeling that Scott would communicate with them but they didn’t expect to have Professor Adrian Owen from the Brain and Mind Institute at the University of Ontario agree with them.
Professor Owen used Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to assess how vegetative patients responded to yes or no questions. In order to see if a patient was answering yes or no to their questions, Owen gave them two scenarios to think about. He told patients to either think about playing tennis, which stimulated the premotor cortex in the brain, or walking around their house, which stimulated the parahippocampal gyrus. The fMRIs was able to detect where oxygen rich blood was flowing to see which parts of the brain were being stimulated. Using this technique, the information Professor Owen and his team found would mean “medical textbook [would] need rewriting.” Scott was seen to have a conscious mind through these tests. He could answer questions such as whether or not he was in pain. He was even seen to have some memory function because he knew that his sister had had a daughter, an event that happened five years after his accident. Ever since these findings, Owen has stated that one fifth of all vegetative patients have this ability to communicate.
The idea of consciousness, especially in the context of vegetative patients like Scott Routley is discussed heavily in Daniel Bor’s book, The Ravenous Brain. Bor also did another study on the consciousness of VS patients under Adrian Owen. They used different sounds, sentences and tricky words to measure levels of consciousness. In this study, they used increasingly difficult words and compared the fMRI results of the patients with ones of healthy individuals. This study goes even deeper than the study Walsh describes in that they found that the better patients would do in these tests, the more likely they would be to recover from their injuries.
Bor agrees that studies like this shows that although one may appear to be unconscious, he/she still has a thinking brain. In the diagrams Owen shows in the BBCNews clip, it is clear that patients in the vegetative state have much greater activity in the brain than brain dead patients do. This explains why patients like Scott Routley still have memory functions and can respond to questions. By using fMRIs in the way Owen and Bor have, they will be able to address any concerns a VS patient may have but not be able to say. They have revolutionized this aspect of medicine by being able to decipher between unconscious and partially conscious patients.
Bor, Daniel. The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning. New York: Basic, 2012. Print.
Walsh, Fergus. "Vegetative Patient Scott Routley Says 'I'm Not in Pain'" BBC News Health. BBC, 12 Nov. 2012. Web. 17 Oct. 2014.
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