Rev Neuroscience
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The diagnosis and management of patients with persistent vegetative (PVS) and minimally conscious (MCS) states entail powerful medical, ethical and legal debates. The recent description of the MCS highlights the crucial role of unexpected and well-documented recoveries of cognitive functions. ⋯ We present a review on this topic, emphasizing the clinical and neuroimaging assessment of these states, with some of our recent results in this area. We conclude that the development of rehabilitation techniques for patients with PVS and others suffering long-lasting effects of brain injury is a crucial challenge for actual and future generations of neuroscientists.
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Review Historical Article
Networks of conscious experience: computational neuroscience in understanding life, death, and consciousness.
We demonstrate brain locations appearing to correlate with consciousness, but not being directly responsible for it. Technology reveals that brain activity is associated with consciousness but is not equivalent to it. We examine how consciousness occurs at critical levels of complexity. ⋯ There is no threshold or rationale specified; rather, consciousness 'just happens'. Consciousness then involves an awareness of what we are sensing or experiencing and some ability to control or coordinate voluntary actions. These issues of life, death, and consciousness are discussed in the context of Mike, the headless chicken, who survived for 18 months, and in the context of consciousness with high degrees of intellectual and cognitive function in a congenitally anencephalic brain; additionally, in the reanimation work of Soviet scientists in the 1920-30s, and in auditory sentence processing in patients in comatose, vegetative, and minimally conscious states.