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Deciding whether a given patient in a vegetative state has any awareness or capability of even simple thought is generally problematic because the patient lacks motor responses. A patient in the minimally conscious state has some motor responses, but these are intermittent and not always decipherable.
In an ongoing effort to use imaging techniques to detect conscious function even in the absence of motor function, researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study 23 patients in a vegetative state and 31 patients in a minimally conscious state. The researchers instructed the patients to imagine playing tennis or navigating in their houses or a familiar city while undergoing fMRI scans.
In 16 healthy, conscious adults, imag…