Persistent consciousness?

A bit more from Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperCollins, 2010):

Can we speak of consciousness when a person is in a coma?  A recent article in Science looked at the scientific evidence of awareness in a patient in a vegetative state.  This is a form of coma with spontaneous breathing and brain-stem reflexes.  Brain tests showed that when this patient was instructed to imagine certain activities like playing tennis or moving around her home, the monitors recorded changes identical to those in healthy volunteers who carried out the same instructions.  This means that the identified changes can be explained only by assuming that this patient, despite her vegetative state, not only understood the verbal instructions but also carried them out.  The research demonstrated that this coma patient was aware of both herself and her surroundings but that her brain damage prevented her from communicating her thoughts and emotions directly to the outside world.  In her book Uit coma (Out of Coma), Alison Korthals Altes also describes seeing staff and family in and around the intensive care unit during her three-week coma following a serious traffic accident.

Can we still speak of consciousness when a person has been pronounced brain-dead?  In his book Droomvlucht in coma (Dream Flight in Coma), Jan Kerkhoffs tells us about his conscious experiences after neurologists declared him brain-dead following complications during brain surgery.  Only because his family refused organ donation was he able to write about his experiences because, much to everybody’s surprise, he regained consciousness after three weeks in a coma.  (ix-x)

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Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture has published a second piece today:

“A Modern Translation of Genesis 1–11 in the Traditional Sense”

If you would like to hear it read in a pleasant British accent, click on the MP3 Audio button to the right of the article.

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If Robert Boylan had recorded this important little piece, he would have done so with an Irish accent:

“Joseph Smith’s warning about the dangers of apostasy”

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The latest iteration of the bi-weekly Hamblin-Peterson column has now appeared in the Deseret News:

“The Reformation and the emergence of Anabaptists, Amish, Mennonites and other Protestant denominations”

Read it only if you have, by training and practice, developed high tolerance for hateful bigotry and vitriol.  Columns in which I’m involved are not for the faint of heart.