I’ve told people about this trick before (a lot, I feel), but this is about a new paper just published that found at least one (out of 54) vegetative patients able to respond to yes or no questions through willful modulation of brain activity:

In the current experiment, the researchers found that three other patients identified as vegetative showed similar responses. To open a channel of communication, they instructed one of them, the 29-year-old man, to associate thoughts about tennis with “yes” and thoughts about being in his house with “no.”

They then asked questions, repeating the procedure numerous times, switching the associations — tennis with yes, then with no — to make sure the patient was in fact making conscious choices. The researchers had previously tested the technique in healthy volunteers.

“We asked basic biographical questions, like ‘Is your father’s name Thomas?’ and ‘Have you ever been to the United States?’ ” said Adrian M. Owen, a neuroscientist at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, England, who developed the method and was a co-author of the paper. “We then checked whether the answers were correct. They were.” (NYT)

What’s a little weird here is that in previous experiments in this vein that I was aware of they also used the navigating house/playing tennis pair of thoughts for signaling. I understand how thinking about motor-y stuff and thinking about spacial memory stuff could be different brain scan-wise, but why tennis? Is that just the accepted convention or something? Do people who play with fMRI machines just tend to like tennis? (This is why I need to be there, to ask these questions.)

UPDATE: Turns out is was just the same folks working on new vegetables.

Also, again regarding brains: ethics?