Bioethicists take note

One of the bigger areas in bioethics is the cluster of questions involving the end of life, such as, Is euthanasia morally permissible? Some folks are attracted to the idea that, if a person is in a vegetative state, then they may lack conscious awareness, and as a result, euthanasia may be permitted for certain vegetative patients.

A new article in Science looks like it provides evidence that undermines one of the above premises, namely, that patients in vegetative states are not conscious. Here's the abstract:

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to demonstrate preserved conscious awareness in a patient fulfilling the criteria for a diagnosis of vegetative state. When asked to imagine playing tennis or moving around her home, the patient activated predicted cortical areas in a manner indistinguishable from that of healthy volunteers.

The authors of course do not claim that every (or even many) vegetative patients maintain this level of consciousness. Furthermore, they recognize that some people may not consider even this amount of brain activity to amount to conscious thought. But their next step is an encouraging one: developing a battery of fMRI tests to determine whether a particular patient has this degree of consciousness or not -- so we no longer have to guess at whether someone who's been unresponsive for 5 months (as their test subject had) is conscious or not.

UPDATE: I now see that Brains not only beat me to this story, but Pete Mandik has much more insightful commentary on it too. Oh well.

Something else about Mary the neuroscientist

After writing my recent post about Sue Barry, the real-life example of Frank Jackson's Mary the neuroscientist, I received a very interesting email from... Sue Barry. Prof. Barry's email was generous and insightful, and I felt fortunate that she took the time to write me. I just wanted to mention a couple other striking things (for philosophers, at least) about her case, which came up in both her email to me and the NPR story about her that (at least here in Pittsburgh) was broadcast a day or two after my original post.

1. Sue had studied descriptions of what stereoscopic vision was like before she acquired it herself. She thought, back then, that she could imagine (at least roughly) what having stereoscopic vision was like. After getting such vision, though, she discovered that what she imagined it was like was completely different from the actual experience.

2. In describing the difference between her previous and current visual perceptions, Sue says that she can now perceive space, whereas she (now realizes that she) couldn't before. This strikes me as interesting, because we (and here I mean both philosophers working on particular problems in epistemology and philosophy of mind, as well as non-philosophers) usually think of the objects of perception as things, or attributes of things, or the like. (Consider: 'What do you see?' Compare "I see an apple" with "I see space".)

Finally, one thing that comes out clearly in the New Yorker article, the NPR story, and the email is that Prof. Barry is a generous, magnanimous person -- and that she is now getting a great deal of pleasure from an aspect of her perceptual system that most of us take for granted.

Sue Barry, a real-life Mary the neuroscientist

I'm sure this will be noted all over the philosophical regions of the blogosphere, but in the latest issue of the New Yorker, there is an example of a real person who basically fits Frank Jackson's famous example of Mary the neuroscientist -- though in this case, it is not color vision, but stereoscopic vision, that the person gains. The person is named Sue Barry, and she actually is a neurobiologist. Unfortunately, the article is not online.

(For those unfamiliar with Frank Jackson's thought-experiment, Mary is a neuroscientist of color who knows all the neuroscientific theories associated with color vision (even those theories that have not yet been discovered and formulated) -- but she is raised in a completely monochrome/ black-and-white environment. If Mary suddenly sees colors one day, does she have a fundamentally new experience? Does she learn anything? A recent book, There's Something about Mary (publisher's page, review in NDPR), is entirely devoted to issues involving this thought-experiment.)