Psience Quest

"Hidden Consciousness" Offers Hope for Unresponsive Victims of Brain Trauma

Emma Betuel

Quote:When a patient is in a coma or other vegetative state, there’s a few ways to search for consciousness, even if the patient isn’t able to directly communicate. One of these methods is to ask the patient to perform basic commands, like opening or closing fingers while taking an MRI of their brain. Another method, demonstrated in a paper published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine is to use electroencephalography (EEG) in conjunction with a new machine learning algorithm trained to hunt for clues.

When neurologist Jan Claassen, M.D.,Ph.D. and his team applied this technique to 104 unresponsive patients, they picked up tiny echoes of consciousness in 15 percent of them. Those signs of “hidden consciousness” could be strong indicators that these patients will recover, if given enough time.

Interesting, and it is a serious subject affecting real people.

I just wanted to add that in a very real sense all consciousness is hidden. We can't see it, smell it, touch it. All we can do is look for correlations.