Finding consciousnessFinding consciousness
All In The Mind
To help determine consciousness, a neuroscientist tells jokes to a person in a vegetative state, and scans their brain—Professor Adrian Owen describes his research.
28:52•13 Nov 2016
Hidden Minds: Jokes, Brain Scans and the Search for Consciousness
Episode Overview
- Brain scans show that around one in five clinically vegetative patients may have clear signs of awareness.
- Mental imagery tasks, such as imagining tennis or walking through a house, can be used as yes–no communication tools inside scanners.
- Sophisticated jokes and puns help reveal whether a patient understands language at a high level and can experience humour.
- Positive brain responses in imaging are linked to better chances of recovery, offering useful information for prognosis.
- Martin Pistorius’ story highlights the importance of treating all patients with kindness, dignity and respect, regardless of assumed awareness.
“I think that there is always hope, no matter how small. Treat people how you would want to be treated, with kindness, dignity, compassion and respect.”
What can we learn from those who have battled addiction, brain injury and everything in between? This instalment of All In The Mind turns to one of the most unsettling questions in medicine: how do you know if someone, clinically labelled as being in a vegetative state, is actually conscious? You’ll hear about Martin Pistorius, who spent a decade locked inside his body, silently observing nurses and relatives who assumed he was unaware.
His description of waking up into awareness – like a blurry grey image slowly returning to “vibrant colour” – sets the emotional tone for the episode and shows just how isolating unseen consciousness can be. Neuroscientist Professor Adrian Owen then takes centre stage, sharing how brain scanning has changed what doctors think they know about consciousness.
Starting with patient Kate Bainbridge in the 1990s, Owen explains how showing familiar faces and playing sentences in a scanner revealed that some supposedly vegetative patients had brain responses indistinguishable from healthy people. Things get both clever and slightly cheeky when Owen talks about telling jokes to patients inside scanners. By using sophisticated puns like, “There are two fish in a tank.
One says to the other, ‘Do you know how to drive this thing?’”, his team looks for humour-related brain activity as proof that someone understands language at a high level. The episode also covers the now-famous “tennis” experiment, where patients are asked to imagine playing tennis to signal “yes” and walking through their house to signal “no”.
Remarkably, around one in five patients who appear fully vegetative show reliable brain responses, hinting at a hidden, locked-in awareness and raising major ethical questions about diagnosis, prognosis and life-or-death decisions. Aimed at anyone curious about consciousness, brain injury, and the limits of medical assessment, this thoughtful mix of science and human story leaves you asking: how many people are more aware than they seem, and what would change if we could hear them?
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