From the BBC: Vegetative patient ‘communicates.’

Five months after her accident, which happened in July 2005, the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) to record the woman’s brain activity.

She was diagnosed as being in a vegetative state, which meant even when she was awake, she was unresponsive.

While her brain was being mapped, the researchers asked her to imagine simple tasks, such as walking around her home and playing tennis.

Lead scientist Dr Adrian Owen, a neuroscientist from the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, said: “The tasks we chose are based on many years of brain imaging research that shows different areas of the brain are activated when we perform different kinds of tasks.”

When the scientists compared her brain activity to that of healthy patients, who had been asked to carry out the same task, they discovered the patterns were “indistinguishable”.

Dr Owen said: “These are startling results.

“It tells us the patient could understand speech, because of course, we asked her to do these things. It also tells us that she is able to perform simple tasks in her head, such as imagining certain scenarios.

“We see this as a proof of principle: we have found a way to show that a patient is aware when existing clinical methods have been unable to provide that information.”

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