
'Vegetative' patient speaks to scientists using his brainwaves - prat
http://news.scotsman.com/science/I39m-alive-39Vegetative39-patient-speaks.6041415.jp
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aarongough
If that patient is actually aware of his surroundings, then he has been
trapped in a body with almost no sensory input for almost 6 years. Personally,
that sounds like the worst hell imaginable.

I've told everyone close to me that if I am injured badly they are to ask for
'no extreme measures' for this exact reason...

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tel
It's just the opposite actually, and worse. If he's aware of his surroundings,
he's been trapped for 6 years without any output instead. Able to observe and
think, but unable to move, unable to speak, unable to interact with or affect
his environment except as a comatose patient.

Being Locked-in is one of the worst things I can imagine and yet is very real.

~~~
aarongough
Yes, you are absolutely correct. I was kind of thinking in terms of
interaction but got it backward.

What I was trying to convey was that no matter how dedicated your loved ones
are they're not going to be with you every minute of every day if you're
apparently comatose. That means this poor guy has probably spent most of the
last six years lying in a bed by himself with nothing going on around him...

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ajuc
Great news, comminucation is the most important thing.

Here is the story boy that was unable to speak or contact with world and was
considered "vegetable" by doctors, till he picked up a language BLISS from a
teacher that was teaching some other child in his hospital room.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvpGLxU6fVY>

He is a poet now.

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RiderOfGiraffes
Reported earlier: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1099274>

That sank without a trace - no comments, no upvotes - perhaps this report will
get a better response. I think it's interesting, so I hope it does.

It's a fascinating idea, getting yes/no answers from brain scans. The
potential is there for using text output devices similar to those that Hawking
uses, except driven by the patient imagining playing tennis.

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jacquesm
> That sank without a trace - no comments, no upvotes -

That's because it didn't mention the Ipad.

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RiderOfGiraffes
Now it's appeared via a New Scientist link as well:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1100899>

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pmichaud
This story gave me goosebumps--imagine the depth of joy he felt when he was
finally able to get through to someone. Blows my mind.

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ghotli
There was a book written by a man with locked-in syndrome after a stroke. It
made me want to write a living will.

"The entire book was written by Bauby blinking his left eyelid, which took ten
months (four hours a day). A transcriber repeatedly recited a French language
frequency-ordered alphabet (E, S, A, R, I, N, T, U, L, etc.), until Bauby
blinked to choose the next letter. The book took about 200,000 blinks to write
and an average word took approximately two minutes. The book also chronicles
everyday events for a person with locked-in syndrome."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diving_Bell_and_the_Butterf...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diving_Bell_and_the_Butterfly)

~~~
mckilljoy
So she went linearly through the whole alphabet until he found the letter he
wanted? Sounds like somebody should have used a binary search! Hey-oooo!

~~~
albertni
I wonder which would actually faster - binary search on the standard ordered
alphabet or going linearly in order of letter frequency.

Even better - some hybrid algorithm that goes through the most common letters
then goes into binary search for the remaining letters (many of which appear
at approximately equal frequency)

~~~
ajuc
Binary search in unbalanced tree with shorter branches to more frequently used
letters will be probably best (this is really huffman coding, isn't it?

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llimllib
This is a much more informative link, with actual science!
<http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=1550>

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mckilljoy
This whole story is really very fascinating, although a few details seem a bit
odd.

For example, the patient didn't answer the last question because.. he fell
asleep? I would imagine if I was trapped inside my body and suddenly given a
mechanism to communicate, I would be too excited to fall asleep.

Did they observe any signs of excitement that I would expect a person to feel
in this situation? Increased heart rate or other brain activity? Did the man
try to convey his own message using the new-found communication mechanism?

It almost sounds like they are communicating with some small ghost of the
man's subconscious, something that can respond to basic queries and recall
memories, but lacks what we would really consider a consciousness.

~~~
pohl
_Did the man try to convey his own message using the new-found communication
mechanism?_

If I understand correctly, he was given the means to convey "yes" by imagining
himself playing tennis. The concept of "no" was encoded by the absence of
"yes".

If he had wanted to send some message, like "tell my children I love them", or
"I feel pain in my abdomen", how would he encode it?

~~~
bitwize
"No" was encoded by imagining himself walking from room to room.

The absence of anything was recorded as "no answer".

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loaristys
This is an interesting new development in what was a couple of years ago an
already observed phenomenon by half of the same team:

<http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/313/5792/1402>

However, I think their publishing the idea that these patients were
"conscious" is morally questionable. The reasons for this are expressed far
more elegantly that I could manage by Parashkev Nachev in the following
response:

<http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/sci;315/5816/1221a.pdf>

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DanielBMarkham
I can't even to begin to imagine the loneliness you have to feel trapped
inside your own mind like that.

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S_A_P
I could imagine this becoming part of a regimen for "physical" therapy. Also
makes me wonder about others who have had the plug pulled...

