• Question: How can you be in a coma and still hear things when you brain is supposed to be switched off?

    Asked by popthebottle to Meeks, Pete, Stephen, Steve, Tom on 18 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Marieke Navin

      Marieke Navin answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      Tom i’m sure will know more here, but not the *entire* brain is switched off -it’s such a complex organ.

    • Photo: Tom Hartley

      Tom Hartley answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      You can have some residual thought or sensation in a coma, but people also talk about “persistent vegetative state” where the idea is that you have no real brain function left. Recent studies with fMRI showed that some patients can understand questions. Adrian Owen and colleagues asked patients to imagine either walking through a house (for “no”) or playing tennis (for “yes”). In healthy people imagining these different things creates very different patterns of activity which can easily be distinguished. *Some* of the patients were able to answer yes/no questions in this way. So basically the idea that they were in a vegetative state was wrong – they are conscious, and maybe thinking just like you or I. Which is a scary thought. A good way to use a brain scanner, but its not practical to use it as a communication device – perhaps now someone will be able to figure out a cheap and simple way to allow them to communicate – it must be dreadful being “locked in”.

    • Photo: Stephen Curry

      Stephen Curry answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      Hi popthebottle,

      I suspect there are many different states that qualify as coma – which is a state in which you are unable to move or communicate with the outside world. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that people in a coma are deaf to things that are said to them. It’s just that they can’t respond.

      Interestingly, it seems as if people who are unconscious due to anaesthetic on the operating table can still hear what the doctors and nurses are saying. There have been studies that show that people recover quicker after an op if the comments made during it have been positive. So ‘this is going well, isn’t it?” has a better affect that ‘oops! didn’t mean to cut that!’

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