It's not clear to me that the doctor established as good a baseline with Carol as the other patient, but at any rate, seems easy enough to seek out a binary response signal provable on known facts for each patient to determine their responsiveness, and then develop a battery of yes/no questions that test all of their non-motor conscious thought processes.
By changing his pattern of brain activity in the scanner to indicate a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’, Scott was able to tell us that he knew where he was, how long he’d been there, what he enjoyed watching on TV, and whether or not he was in any pain (he wasn’t).
These questions are very open ended and it's difficult to guess how they were made. Is there a link to the paper? Did the person asking the questions know the correct answer? Did the person asking managing the fMRI know the correct answer? Did the person looking at the patterns know the correct answer?
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It's not clear to me that the doctor established as good a baseline with Carol as the other patient, but at any rate, seems easy enough to seek out a binary response signal provable on known facts for each patient to determine their responsiveness, and then develop a battery of yes/no questions that test all of their non-motor conscious thought processes.
I'm also skeptical. FTA:
These questions are very open ended and it's difficult to guess how they were made. Is there a link to the paper? Did the person asking the questions know the correct answer? Did the person asking managing the fMRI know the correct answer? Did the person looking at the patterns know the correct answer?