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Imagine this scenario. You've unfortunately had a terrible accident.
想象一下这个场景。你不幸遭遇了一场可怕的事故。
You're lying in a hospital bed and you're aware—you're aware but you're unable to respond, but the doctors and your relatives don't know that.
你躺在医院的病床上，你是有意识的，但你无法回应，而且医生和你的亲属也不知道。
And you have to lie there, listening to them deciding whether to let you live or die. I can think of nothing more terrifying.
你不得不躺着，听他们决定你的生与死。我想不出比这更可怕的了。
I'm Dr. Adrian Owen. I'm the author of ‘Into the Gray Zone', a neuroscientist explores the border between life and death.
我是阿德里安·欧文医生。我是《进入灰色地带》一书的作者，一位探索生与死的边界的神经科学家。
Communication is at the very heart of what makes us human. It's the basis of everything.
沟通是我们之所以为人的核心。它亦是一切的基础。
What we're doing is we're returning the ability to communicate to some patients who seem to have lost that forever.
我们要做的是，我们要把沟通的能力还给一些似乎永远失去这种能力的患者。
The vegetative state is often referred to as a state of wakefulness without awareness.
植物人状态通常被认为是一种没有意识的清醒状态。
Patients open their eyes, they'll just gaze around the room.
病人睁开眼睛，只会环顾四周。
They'll have sleeping and waking cycles, but they never show any evidence of having any awareness.
他们会有睡眠和觉醒的周期，但他们从未表现出任何有意识的迹象。
So, typically, the way that we assess consciousness is through command following.
因此，通常情况下我们评估意识是通过命令的遵循情况。
We ask somebody to do something, say, squeeze our hand, and if they do it, you know that they're conscious.
我们让某人做某事，比如说，握紧我们的手，如果他们做了，就知道他们是有意识的。
The problem in the vegetative state is that these patients by definition can produce no movements.
植物人状态的问题是，显然这些病人是无法活动的。
And the question I asked is, well, could somebody command follow with their brain?
我的问题是，有人能用他们的大脑来指挥行动吗？
It was that idea that pushed us into a new realm of understanding this patient population.
正是这一想法推动我们进入了一个新的领域，去了解这一患者群体。
When a part of your brain is involved in generating a thought or performing an action, it burns energy in the form of glucose, and it's replenished through blood flow.
当你大脑的一部分参与到产生一个想法或执行一个动作时，它以葡萄糖的形式燃烧能量，并通过血液流动得到补充。
As blood flows to that part of the brain, we're able to see that with the FMRI scanner.
当血液流向大脑的那个部分时，我们可以通过磁共振功能成像扫描仪看到。
I think one of the key insights was the realization that we could simply get somebody to lie in the scanner and imagine something,
我认为其中一个关键之处在于我们实现了仅需让人躺在扫描仪上想象一些东西，
and based on the pattern of brain activity, we will be able to work out what it is they were thinking.
根据其大脑活动的模式，我们就能知道他们在想什么。
We had to find something that produces really a quite distinct pattern of activity that was more or less the same for everybody.
我们必须找到一种能产生一种截然不同的活动模式的东西，这种模式对每个人来说差不多都是一样的。
So, we came up with two tasks.
所以，我们想出了两个任务。
One task, imagine playing tennis, produces activity in the premotor cortex in almost every healthy person we tried this in.
其中一项任务，想象一下打网球，几乎每个健康人的前运动皮质区都会产生活动。
A different task, thinking about moving from room to room in your house, produces an entirely different pattern of brain activity; particularly, it involves a part of the brain known as the parahippocampal gyrus.
另一项不同的任务，想象你从一个房间走到另一个房间，会产生一种完全不同的大脑活动模式；特别是，它涉及到大脑中被称为海马旁回的部分。
And again, it's very consistent across different people.
而且，在不同人身上测验后都是一致的。
So, we realized that we could use this as a simple mechanism for asking yes or no questions.
因此，我们意识到可以用这种简单的机制来问是与否的问题。
We could say, well, I'm going to ask you a question.
比如我们可以说，我要问你一个问题。
If the answer is yes, imagine playing tennis. If the answer is no, imagine thinking about moving through the rooms of your home.
如果答案是肯定的，想象一下在打网球。如果答案是否定的，想象一下在家里的房间走动。
I can still remember exactly what it felt like the first time we saw a patient that we thought was in a vegetative state activate their brain in the scanner. The patient's name was Kate.
我仍然清楚地记得我们第一次看到一个我们认为处于植物人状态的病人在扫描仪中激活他们的大脑时的感觉。病人名叫凯特。
Nobody would have predicted that we would have seen brain activity in response to asking a patient to do something.
没有人会预料到，我们会在要求病人做某事时看到其大脑活动的反应。
And when we first saw it, it was absolutely astonishing. Before we made that discovery, nobody ever bothered to look at any of these patients.
当我们第一次看到的时候，那绝对是惊人的。在我们发现这一点之前，没有人费心去看这些病人。
Very few people even ask the question: Is it possible that some of them are there? Now, people ask this question all the time.
很少有人会问这样一个问题：他们中的一些人可能在那里吗？现在，人们总是问这个问题。
We've scanned several hundred patients who were presumed to be in a vegetative state. It turns out that about 20%, or one in five of them, is not that at all.
我们扫描了几百名被认为处于植物人状态的病人。结果是20%的人，或者说五分之一的人，根本不是这样。
By that, I mean they're aware of the situation they're in, they're aware of conversations going on around them, they have thoughts, they have emotions.
我的意思是，他们意识到自己所处的环境，意识到周围正在进行的对话，他们有思想也有情感。
They maybe even have feelings about their future but are largely unable to move any part of their body.
他们甚至可能对自己的未来有感觉，但基本上无法移动身体的任何部位。
I think you could very easily describe what we've done as an early version of mind reading.
我想你可以很容易地把我们所做的描述成早期的读心术。
I think over the next few years this is going to be a really exciting area of research and we will move closer and closer to being able to decode what somebody is actually thinking.
我认为在接下来的几年里，这将是一个非常令人兴奋的研究领域，我们将越来越接近能够解码某人的真实想法。
We are now in a position where we can ask some of these patients what it is that would make them more comfortable, even, are you in any pain?
我们现在可以问这些病人什么能让他们更舒服，甚至，你有没有疼痛感？
And of course, we can act on those questions, we can make them more comfortable.
当然，我们可以针对这些问题采取行动，我们可以让他们感到更舒服。
Communication is the thing that really makes us human.
沟通是真正使我们成为人的东西。
If we can give these patients back the ability to make decisions, I think we can give them back a little piece of their humanity.
如果我们能让这些病人重新拥有做决定的能力，我想我们就能让他们找回他们人性的一部分。
