Daydreaming Brain Reveals Secrets of Comas and Consciousness

Daydreaming Brain Reveals Secrets of Comas and Consciousness

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• Jun 16, 2008 at 11:33 PM
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Scientist have now discovered a way to predict or estimate whether people with severe brain damage will ever gain consciousness.  Scans have shown that even severely damaged brains have a part which stays very active and acts as an indicator to whether the patient has a good or bad chance of regaining consciousness, period.

A Belgium team of researchers have told a conference that a default network in the brain seems to mirror the level of consciousness of the brain. To go even further they indicate that significant evidence suggested that it is associated with daydreaming. The default network in the brain's cortex appears to be more active when the brain is not actively working on a goal - hence the proposed link with daydreaming.  Some evidence suggests that it helps get the brain ready for the next task, although this remains a controversial theory. Problems activating the default network have been linked to cognitive diseases like Alzheimer's and schizophrenia.

Now Steven Laureys and colleagues at the University of Liège in Belgium have used brain scans to measure the activity of the default network in 13 brain-damaged people whose levels of consciousness were different.

Some were "minimally conscious", while others were in a coma, or a persistent vegetative state (PVS). A final group were "brain dead".

He found that minimally conscious patients had only a 10% fall in normal activity in this area, while in coma and PVS patients, it fell by approximately 35%.

There was no activity at all in the brain-dead patients.

David Power