Reviving unresponsive patients has long been a dream of humanity, and an oft-talked about part of the human condition. Maybe you’ve cried along with the movie Awakenings, or had long conversations with relatives about what happens should you or they end up in the same position. But these conversations would be much different if you could restore consciousness, as a new paper claims to do... kind of. A French patient received a traumatic brain injury fifteen years ago, putting him into a vegetative state. After stimulating a part of the brain, scientists were seemingly able to restore some of the patients’ consciousness. But no, we’re not quite at Awakenings yet. A vegetative state is not a coma. Instead, the brain-damaged patient is awake but unaware and conscious-less. A paper in BMC Medicine describes the condition as “only showing reflex movements without response to command.” Put very simply, researchers are pretty sure the condition has something to do with brain damage altering how electrical signals travel between the inner and outer sections of the brain, as well as around the outer layer. Some patients recover from vegetative states, but others don’t. read more https://gizmodo.com/man-in-a-vegetative-state-for-15-years-stirs-after-brai-1818782267
