Adrian Owen

"...{T}he heart of grey zone science is about finding people who have been lost to us and reconnecting them with the people they love and who love them. Each contact feels like a miracle."

Adrian Owen is a neuroscientist who began to study the question of whether people in a persistent vegetative state (long-term comas) have any conscious awareness. He became interested in the subject, partly because of reports that some people who had awoken from such comas indicated that the did have some awareness of what was going on around them while ostensibly in a coma. In addition, Owen's former long-term girl friend suffered head trauma and was in such a "vegetative state."

At the time Owen began his research, PET scanning was in its infancy. I was fascinated with Owen's discussions on how he devised the various experiments he performed. His first experiment was to determine whether the brain activity of these patients changed when they were exposed to something familiar, for example photos of their families, or their voices. After expansive experiments, Owen was able to determine that in fact a significant percentage of those in persistent vegetative state had some degree of awareness and brain activity.

Owen then pondered whether this brain activity was merely involuntary, and not an actual conscious act of thinking. In his next set of experiments, Owen decided to whether he could in some way communicate with these patients, and show that their brain activity was the result of voluntary thought. By this time, Owen was working with MRIs, and the science of mapping the functions of the various parts of the brain was well under way. The basis of the experiment Owen devised was to ask the comatose patients a question, the answer to which would activate a specific known area of the brain. One of the questions to be asked was ask the subject to imagine entering their home and moving from room to room throughout the home. When asked of non-comatose patients this question elicited activity in the part of the brain related to spatial thinking. The second question was to ask the subject to imagine him/herself playing tennis. This was known to activate the part of the brain which initiates and controls voluntary movement.

Once again, Owen discovered that a significant percentage of patients thought to be in a persistent vegetative state consciously responded to these requests, activating the corresponding areas in their brains. As the experiment progressed, Owen began using the technique to have the patients answer specific questions, i.e. if the answer to the question is yes, think about playing tennis, if the answer is no, think about walking through your house. In this way, Owen was able to ask patients questions such as whether they were in pain, or whether they were aware of significant family events (i.e. the birth of a niece).

This was a fascinating book. It was very readable, and there is little to no mysterious medical jargon. There is an interesting BBC program on Owen's work that you can google. (I think it's called The Gray Zone). Highly recommended.

3 1/2 stars… (más)