Through the Veil

I read a very interesting article in the New Yorker today regarding people in vegetative states. There tends to be slightly more interaction with the outside world by a person in a vegetative state than a person with a coma. Often their eyes will be open and may move around.

From the article:

For four months, Bainbridge had not spoken or responded to her family or her doctors, although her eyes were often open and roving. (A person in a coma appears to be asleep and is unaware of even painful stimulation; a person in a vegetative state has periods of wakefulness but shows no awareness of her environment and does not make purposeful movements.) Owen placed Bainbridge in a PET scanner, a machine that records changes in metabolism and blood flow in the brain, and, on a screen in front of her, projected photographs of faces belonging to members of her family, as well as digitally distorted images, in which the faces were unrecognizable. Whenever pictures of Bainbridge’s family flashed on the screen, an area of her brain called the fusiform gyrus, which neuroscientists had identified as playing a central role in face recognition, lit up on the scan. “We were stunned,” Owen told me. “The fusiform-gyrus activation in her brain was not simply similar to normal; it was exactly the same as normal volunteers’.”

These types of articles always really interest me because they provide a degree of insight into the neurobiological basis of consciousness. Does the inability to interact with the world in a conventional manner an indicator of a lack of consciousness? If so, what does the facial recognition of loved ones and therefore some ability to recall memories indicate? We have much to learn about the human brain and people in these different states of consciousness.