Film director Alfred Hitchcock – “The Master of Suspense” – made thrillers that certainly captured his audience’s imagination. But now, researchers from Western University in Canada have used one of his short films to reveal consciousness in patients in a vegetative state, one of whom had been completely unresponsive for 16 years.

Share on Pinterest Patients in a vegetative state had brain activity levels matching those of healthy controls while watching a Hitchcock film.

Image credit: Lorina Naci

Results of the study are published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The researchers include postdoctoral fellow Lorina Naci and Canada Excellence Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience and Imaging Adrian Owen.

They note that patients who are conscious but unable to speak or show voluntary behavior are unable to convey their conscious experiences to others.

As such, it has been impossible to determine whether these patients are conscious or not, and the team suspects that many patients have been misdiagnosed as lacking consciousness.

To further investigate, the researchers had both healthy and unresponsive participants watch a short film by Alfred Hitchcock while inside the functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scanner at Western’s Centre for Functional and Metabolic Mapping.

The movie was a short film from Hitchcock that had been edited down to 8 minutes in order to keep the scanning session brief.

Though they edited the scenes, the researchers say they maintained the lead storyline, which involved a 5-year-old boy finding his uncle’s revolver, partially loading it with bullets, and playing with it at home and in public, unaware of the danger it poses.