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Neuroscience: The mind reader

Nature volume 486, pages 178–180 (2012)Cite this article

Subjects

Adrian Owen has found a way to use brain scans to communicate with people previously written off as unreachable. Now, he is fighting to take his methods to the clinic.

Adrian Owen still gets animated when he talks about patient 23. The patient was only 24 years old when his life was devastated by a car accident. Alive but unresponsive, he had been languishing in what neurologists refer to as a vegetative state for five years, when Owen, a neuro-scientist then at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues at the University of Liège in Belgium, put him into a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and started asking him questions.

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Authors
  1. David Cyranoski
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Cyranoski, D. Neuroscience: The mind reader. Nature 486, 178–180 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/486178a

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