Volume 3 — Issue 5
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NEUROSCIENCE
Awake and aware
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Your Science Students’ Council connects you to Dr. Adrian Owen’s world famous search for the soul Caitlin Martin-Newnham Outreach Editor
“If you are aware, raise your left hand,” Dr. Adrian Owen instructed the audience. He was demonstrating a concept called ‘command following’ that allows researchers to measure awareness. Awareness and wakefulness are the two components that define consciousness, which is exactly what Owen is trying to find in vegetative state patients. Vegetative state patients can open their eyes, have sleeping and waking cycles, and appear to look around at their environment, but they cannot fixate their gaze on anything. Unlike coma patients, vegetative state patients display ‘wakefulness’. It is awareness that is difficult to determine in a patient that cannot physically or verbally respond. They cannot say, “Yes, I am aware,” and they cannot raise their left hand, as the audience was capable of doing. It was in Cambridge, England, with a patient named Kate that Owen’s interest in the topic began. Kate came to the hospital presenting flu-like symptoms, and then fell into a vegetative state that persisted for five months. At the time, Dr. Owen was working in brain imaging, and decided to put her in an MRI machine to see if she had any brain activity. Owen admitted, “I don’t know why we did it, actually.” They showed her pictures of her friends
and family and, like healthy patients, her fusiform gyrus lit up. “This was completely astonishing at the time,” Owen explained. They proceeded to investigate the language regions of the brains of other vegetative patients by looping pre-recorded speeches, and saw great success. A major turning point in Owen’s research occurred when he asked, “What do we have
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to do to convince ourselves that the patients were conscious?” The answer was ‘command following’. Dr. Owen discovered that he could ask vegetative patients in an MRI machine to imagine playing tennis, and one area of the brain would light up. This corresponded to the same area of the brain that would light up in healthy patients that were given the same instructions.
What do we have to do to convince ourselves that the patients were concious?
- Dr. Owen
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On February 5th, British neuroscientist and current Western University Research Chair Dr. Adrian Owen gave a seminar challenging the traditional definition of conciousness.
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It showed that the patients were able to follow commands. He then had the same success with instructing patients to imagine moving around their home, causing a different area of the brain than “tennis playing” to show a burst in activity. Owen now had a way to ask “yes/no” questions to vegetative state patients. He could ask any question, and the patient responded with “yes” by imagining playing tennis, and “no” by imagining moving around their home. He began asking questions to the patients he did not know the answers to in order to eliminate the possibility of influencing the results. This was to determine if the vegetative patient was conscious enough to follow commands and make decisions. For example, one patient’s family gave him a list of names, and one was the patient’s father’s name. He asked the patient which name was their father’s name, and had them answer yes or no to each name by imagining playing tennis or navigating their home. The patient did, in fact, pick out the correct name and answered a number of other questions correctly. One patient was even able to confirm that their sister had a child, and pick the child’s name, which was astonishing because the sister’s child was conceived after the patient entered their vegetative state.
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Current Contributor My cousin’s friend asked: “So what do you want?” To which he replied, “I’ll take the addie, 30mg extended… oh and the Vyvanse caps too.” Before the small baggie was handed off, I saw a glimpse of orange and white starch capsules, some marked with the letters ‘XR’. The innocuous exchange was made in the library parking lot before my cousin’s prep session. It was definitely SAT season and I had witnessed a transaction completely normal to many students at this time of year. During the drive home, I asked how many kids at his preparatory school took stimulants. Nonchalantly, he replied, “Half the kids de-
velop ADHD before senior year rolls around and the other half buys off them.” The figure was undoubtedly an exaggeration, yet his response was inexplicably unsettling. According to a Kaiser Permanente study published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, ADHD diagnosis has increased 25% in the last decade, most prominently among the upper income class. In North America, the number of prescriptions for people ages 10 to 19 have risen 26 percent since 2007, to almost 21 million yearly (IMS Health). The rate of abuse of non-prescribed medications, such as methylphenidate, is estimated to be between 5% and 35% of North American college-individuals (JAACAP). As well, The Canadian Medical Association Journal notes that in a study conducted
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