Offbeat medical research in 2006

“Brain scans on a woman lying in a vegetative state in a US hospital for five months appeared to show that she was imagining playing tennis.”

OK, this one sounded a bit too good
to be true – unless someone developed technology to decode thoughts while I wasn’t looking. So I tracked down the original article.

The study actually was done at the University of Cambridge. A 23 year old woman suffered head trama in a traffic accident and was diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state. But when a spoken command like “imagine yourself playing Tennis” was given an MRI showed immediate brain activity quite similar to what was observed in normal people.

So: An interesting result, but somewhat different from what was summarized.