There are three questions people ask about consciousness: what it is, how to explain it, and how to measure it. This episode is entirely the third one.
Adrian Owen is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Imaging at Western University in London, Ontario, in the departments of psychology and of physiology and pharmacology. He was made an OBE in 2019 for services to scientific research.
In 2006 he put a woman diagnosed as being in a vegetative state into an fMRI scanner and asked her to imagine playing tennis. She did, and the parts of her brain that plan large upper-body movements lit up. In the twenty years since, he says, several thousand behaviorally non-responsive patients have been found to be aware. He wrote Into the Gray Zone about that work, and a new book, Think Before You Think, came out on August 4th.
We cover:
How often a “vegetative” diagnosis turns out to be wrong
Kate, the 1997 patient, on what the scan changed for her: “The day that you scanned me, I went from being a thing
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