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“The problem up until now has been that we develop these techniques, we put them out there, we tell people how to do them and the only patients that benefit are the people who make it into other research institutions,” Owen says. “It hasn’t been incorporated into guidelines for how one treats these patients. And that has now changed.”

Photo by Paul Mayne

Owen is pushing for the tests to be adopted even more widely, used not just months or years out from a brain injury, but at the front end in the first hours after a traumatic brain injury to help predict which patients might recover from a vegetative state, which ones might benefit from rehabilitation. Most decisions to remove life support — to pull the proverbial “plug” — occur within the first 72 hours after injury. If we can improve prognosis in that group, if we can better understand who might make some recovery, “we can perhaps save some of those lives,” Owen says.

“Maybe a different decision is right for some of those patients.”

Most remarkably, others are testing deep brain stimulation and other interventions to “re-awaken” or hasten awareness in people in minimally conscious states, even years out from their injury.

But the rapidly evolving field is also raising serious ethical challenges, about how we think about consciousness; about false hope and about the existential risks of making people more aware of an existence many would consider a living nightmare.

If someone can modulate their neural activity — communicate via signals from his or her brain — is that a sufficient, or even reliable proxy for speech? And if we find a way to communicate, what, then, do we ask them? Is there anything we can do to make you more comfortable? Is there anything you’d prefer to watch on TV? Do you wish to continue living?