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It is an unimaginable nightmare, trapped inside your own brain, no way to talk, no way to communicate, written off as nearly dead. For five months a 23-year-old English woman laid in what her doctors called a vegetated state. But Cambridge's researchers decided to take a closer look, and were stunned by what they found.

Not only was she able to,er, hear and understand speech, but she was able to carry out simple tasks in her head, it’s clear to us that she was consciously aware, aware of herself and what was going on, what was going on around her.

A patient in a vegetated state will sleep and wake regularly, show some eye movements , but have no discernible response to his/her environment.

This band of cortex here.

Armed with findings of functional MRI scan, doctor Adrul Onwen thinks a lot more is going on, and he’s shattering many long-held beliefs about the vegetated state.

What we're showing here, for the first time, is that we can detect awareness.

Owen’s team plays the vegetated state patient in a machine like this one, and ask her to imagine play tennis at Wimbledon.
This is the brain of healthy volunteer who is imagining play a game of tennis, and this is the brain of our patient, when we ask her to do exactly the same thing, and you can see the same area is activated in both.

With each task, researchers look into specific parts of the brain, involving speech processing, a visualizing a walk through room of her house. Every time, her scans were indistinguishable from those healthy volunteers.

It’s one / patient in one study.

Doctor Joseph Fins says there are about 25 thousand vegetated patients in the United States. But says anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of them are misdiagnosed.

We have to be very cautious about generalizing her experience to all the vegetated patients.

Like Terry Shawel whose brain was deprived of oxygen after cardiac arrest.

This patient was still within the window, of being able to move, this patient’s vegetated state is not Terry Shawel.

Shawel’s type of injury had a much grimmer prognosis from that of the study subject , who suffered a traumatically brain injury from a car accident. Currently there is no treatment for these patients. But doctors hope these scans may help early identify which patients have a better chance of recovery.

Doctor Sanjay Gupta CNN, reporting.