Q: What's a truly futuristic possibility for a noncommunicative hospital patient to converse with doctors?

A: Recent stunning demonstrations of some level of consciousness appeared in brain scans of a 23-year-old woman who after a car accident showed no outward signs of awareness, says David G. Myers in "Psychology: Ninth Edition." When researchers asked her to imagine playing tennis or moving around her home, fMRI scans revealed brain activity in regions identical to those of healthy volunteers. As she imagined the tennis, an area of her brain controlling arm and leg movements became active. Even in a motionless body, the researchers concluded, the brain-- and the mind--may still be active.

Thus in some sense, cognitive neurologists can now "read a person's mind." Researchers wonder if such fMRI scans might enable a "conversation" with unresponsive patients, by instructing them, for example, to answer "yes" to a question by imagining playing tennis and "no" by imagining walking around the house.

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