On the quest for consciousness in vegetative state patients through electrical neuroimaging

Abstract

Consciousness remains an ill-defined concept. This is reflected in clinical practice as there is no objective way to determine that an unresponsive patient is aware of himself and his/her surroundings. However, from the correct answer to this question depends the diagnosis and eventually the continuation of life sustaining aid. Here we discuss how to build on top of recent progress in the field of reverse neural engineering to implement a Test able to detect objective markers of consciousness for completely unresponsive patients. By focusing on the so-called “soft problem of consciousness” -the correlation between the brain and mental functions -we briefly sketch how we plan to provide partial answers the following questions: (1) What are the necessary conditions to confirm that a conscious mind is enclosed in a completely paralyzed body?, (2) How can we extract these responses from neural activity alone?, (3) How could these signals be exploited to establish a minimal dialogue between the patient and a physician using a system that interprets the neural responses?, (4) Is awareness localized to certain neural structures or, instead, is it a global process that depends on the activation of a critical mass of neurons?.