Don’t call people in a coma “vegetables.”  That’s a dehumanizing figure of speech.  And, as researchers have recently discovered, it isn’t necessarily an accurate description: All the patients had the same terrible diagnosis: brain damage that marooned them in a “vegetative state” — alive but without any sense of awareness of themselves or the world around them. But then an international team of scientists tried an ambitious experiment: By measuring electrical activity in the patients’ brains with a relatively simple… Read more