“WHAT IF THERE IS SOMETHING GOING ON IN THERE?”: “Daniel Rios is 24 years old, with wavy black hair, a thick mustache and a glassy stare that seems to look both at you and through you. One day almost four years ago, while he was taking a shower, a blood vessel ruptured in his brain, and he collapsed on the bathroom floor. After emergency surgery, he lay in a coma for three weeks. When he finally opened his eyes, he could not speak or move his body; his head simply lolled. In the months that followed, the doctors monitoring him at the Center for Head Injuries at the J.F.K. Johnson Rehabilitation Institute in Edison, N.J., saw few signs that he had any meaningful mental life. Sometimes he looked as if he were crying. Other times his eyes would follow a mirror passed before his face. On his best days he was able to close his eyes on command. But those days were rare. For the most part he lay unresponsive, adrift in a neurological twilight.

“One morning just over a year after his accident, Rios was taken to the Sloan Kettering Institute on Manhattan’s East Side. There, in a dim room, a group of researchers placed a mask over his eyes, fixed headphones over his ears and guided his head into the bore of an M.R.I. machine. A 40-second loop of a recording made by Rios’s sister Maria played through the headphones: she told him that she was there with him, that she loved him. As the sound entered his ears, the M.R.I. machine scanned his brain, mapping changes in activity. Several hours afterward, two researchers, Nicholas D. Schiff and Joy Hirsch, took a look at the images from the scan. They hadn’t been sure what to expect — Rios was among the first people in his condition to have his brain activity measured in this way — but they certainly weren’t expecting what they saw. ‘We just stared at these images,’ recalls Schiff, an expert in consciousness disorders at Weill Medical College of Cornell University. ‘There didn’t seem to be anything missing.’

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This stuff is important not only to doctors and to the families of people with profound brain injuries. It affects all of us, because there are people right now who may be denied food, water, and the kinds of treatment that in some cases have helped them recover, because somebody deemed them insufficiently conscious with no hope of recovery. Very important link via Amy Welborn.