The Unbearable Burden of Doing
By Miguel Guanipa (09/21/06)
Like a vapor which appears for a moment and then vanishes away, the news came and left as if something of no importance had taken place.
Neuroscientist Adrian Owens and a team of researchers at the University of Cambridge decided to try resonance imaging techniques to measure the neural activity in specific brain regions of a severely brain-damaged 23-year-old woman.
To their utter amazement, when the researchers spoke to the comatose patient the scan showed that the brain’s language processing areas became active in the same way as normal brains do. The researchers went on to ask the woman to imagine herself playing tennis, or walking through her house, and again the scan showed similar accents in the premotor areas of her brain as in those of healthy volunteers. In fact when Mr. Owen’s team compared her brain activity to that of healthy patients who participated in the study they found both patterns to be "indistinguishable".
Although Mr. Owens claimed he was “was absolutely stunned” at the findings he emphasized that these types of responses from the brain were “not unequivocal evidence that [the woman] is consciously aware", while at the same time cautioning that “if we don't see responses in a patient it does not necessarily mean they are not aware”; a momentary lapse of humility in a profession where it is easy to arrogate omniscient status.
Notably, Richard Harris of National Public Radio's science and health desk did not feel compelled to allocate any resources to “report a story that would, in essence, end where it began” Evidently a story that raises several ethical questions about long held assumptions on what it means to be in a state of consciousness and the manner in which we look at people who are in a persistent vegetative state is of no consequence to reporters at NPR.
Steven Laureys of the University of Liege, Belgium remarked that the woman’s brain activity “[showed] a clear act of intention” and added the clause that “The activity in her higher-order cognitive areas means, to me, that she was consciously aware of herself and her surroundings." (Italics mine)
Lionel Naccache of the National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Orsay, France, called the woman's response "quite spectacular" but added that according to neuroscience, consciousness required the engaging “in intentional actions or interactions with the outside world”. Judging from Mr. Naccache’s postscript that areas of the brain that control moving or speaking were left intact in the stock-stilled patient, I gathered he must’ve been talking about moving one’s extremities; an undoubtedly anti-Descartian dictum devolving towards a more pragmatic “You do, therefore you are” approach.
Paul Matthews, a Clinical Neurosciences Professor at the University of Oxford virtually dismissed the findings by saying that in his opinion “the study alone (did) not provide sufficient evidence that (the patient displayed) a conscious interaction with the environment.” That is quite a pessimistic verdict I would say, considering that this is the first time this experiment had been tried. One wonders if his conclusion reflects less an assessment based on solid medical expertise than a bias firmly entrenched on certain philosophical presuppositions.
In spite of the fact that this story has received scarce publicity there are myriad important questions it raises regarding the present criteria used to declare someone consciously unaware and the attendant heart wrenching decisions people face based on such criteria. These questions are of vital importance because prevailing wisdom dictates that one who is in a permanent vegetative state is not entitled to exist.
It seldom requires great effort to relinquish our moral compass to the definitive verdict of the medical experts. We do this, partly in order to rest assured that we have acquiesced in principle to the right ethical choice, especially when it comes to cutting off the line that allows the one we plaintively refer to as the “shell of a person” to continue on living; and it’s a lot easier to dispose of a shell than it is the substance contained (or in this case lacking) therein.
The animation of that substance is what kindles the discourse neuroscientists engage in with the rest of us for whom this type of knowledge is not readily accessible and thus we are left to judge on criteria born of our personal religious inclinations. Moreover, scientists should not patronize the frame of reference us religious folk employ to judge sentience accordingly; after all, we are both vested in circumstances mired with moral conundrums involving matters of life and death.
But in today’s culture we have veered away from the quaint notion of life’s intrinsic sacredness by virtue of the fact that it is a gift, and focused more in the “quality” of life which turns it into a right. By defining life thus we assign levels of inviolability depending on the living person’s ability to display saliently meaningful expressions.
This is why modern ethicists are baffled when they are confronted with a situation like this, since hereto people who were medically defined as being in a persistent vegetative state were considered basically worthless.
In my humble opinion, I believe that perhaps neuroscience’s definition of consciousness needs to be revised.
If we are not interacting intentionally with the world, then half of the couch potatoes in this country are doomed to be euthanized. But consciousness should not always require engaging in intentional actions or interactions with the outside world. People who are asleep can be said to be mentally acting or interacting with some kind of cognitive “reality”, but nobody- at least not yet -presumes that we should escort them onto an eternal sleep.
The fact is that not even the gods of neuroscience are equipped to tell us what constitutes full consciousness. Reducing the concept of consciousness to intentional acts of volition merely reveals the limited scope of understanding we possess about how our minds operate; not to mention it would doom many in “persistent vegetation” status to medical death row.
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