Last Straw

I watched The Diving Bell and the But­ter­fly the other night, a film based on real events about a man that is totally para­lysed and can only com­mu­nic­ate by blink­ing his eye.

But this is some­thing else, amaz­ing:

For seven years the man lay in a hos­pital bed, show­ing no signs of con­scious­ness since sus­tain­ing a trau­matic brain injury in a car acci­dent. His doc­tors were con­vinced he was in a veget­at­ive state. Until now.

To the aston­ish­ment of his med­ical team, the patient has been able to ­com­mu­nic­ate with the out­side world after sci­ent­ists worked out, in effect, a way to read his thoughts.

They devised a tech­nique to enable the man, now 29, to answer yes and no to simple ques­tions through the use of a hi-tech scan­ner, mon­it­or­ing his brain activity.

To answer yes, he was told to think of play­ing ten­nis, a motor activ­ity. To answer no, he was told to think of wan­der­ing from room to room in his home, visu­al­ising everything he would expect to see there, cre­at­ing activ­ity in the part of the brain gov­ern­ing spa­tial awareness.

His doc­tors were amazed when the patient gave the cor­rect answers to a series of ques­tions about his family.