Alfred Hitchcock, our master of suspense, was incredibly good at manipulating his audience—a fact that has now come in handy for neuroscientists. When they screened a Hitchcock thriller for volunteers in a brain scanner, they found that brain activity of a man who has been in a vegetative state for 16 years was astonishingly similar to that of healthy, conscious people.
In the past few years, scientists have slowly inched toward communicating with brain-damaged patients who can’t talk or walk but are minimally aware. Exactly how aware we never knew—until functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) revealed some remarkable results.
via Gizmodo
Image: Hulton Archive/Getty
