Name: Daniel F
Posting: 3
Topic: Health
Title: Awake or Knocked Out? The Line Gets Blurrier
Author: James Gorman
Publication: New York Times
Date of Publication: 4/12
Article Length: 804 words
Experiments done by Michael T. Alkire, Harry Scheinin, and Jaakko W. Langsjo at the University of Turku in Finland show that deciding whether a person is conscious or not is far from a simple manner. There are important consequences, for example, when is a patient 'brain dead' and when can their life support be terminated? What is going through the brain during surgery?
First of all, there is the problem of defining what it means to be conscious: does it mean just some brain activity, the ability to respond to a command, to carry a conversation, or is it more? The experiments done place people under anesthesia, and examine what the people who were supposedly 'unconscious' were able to do. With modern technology, they were able to determine how the brain is active under anesthesia.
What they found was surprising: investigators showed that a person could respond to a simple command to open his eyes when the higher parts of the brain were not yet turned on. Earlier research has also suggested that consciousness is not a simple state that is either on or off. In 2006, for example, Adrian M. Owen, of Cambridge University in England, reported in the journal Science that a patient who was apparently in a vegetative state showed signs of conscious activity in her brain when asked to imagine playing tennis and other movement.
The standard measure of unconsciousness is that a subject or patient does not respond to commands. By that standard, when a subject responds, he’s conscious.
In Dr. Scheinin’s study, when unconscious subjects on this drug were told to open their eyes, they responded. Then most of them drifted back into apparent unconsciousness, without their brain’s neocortex turning on. Only the brainstem, the thalamus and one part of the cortex were active.
And in the broad view, there’s that problem of memory that Dr. Alkire wrote about: if even the patient has no recollection of surgery experience, was he really aware?
In conclusion, the problem of consciousness remains a grey area and is hard to simply define in terms of 'on' or 'off'. Various levels of consciousness may mean that patients can have experiences under anesthesia, even though they may not react or remember them.
This article certainly focuses on more than one disputable issue, including the definition of consciousness and the responsibility of ending a patient's life. I feel that the definition of consciousness itself is enough to strike up substantial controversy. I can definitely see that the current standard measure of consciousness is inadequate according to Dr. Scheinin's research results. The brain scans remarkably revealed that the human brain can, in fact, respond to its surroundings without retaining memory of doing so. These results may render the current standard of consciousness useless, as it seems that most patients, taking the drugs, do fulfill the simple requirement of responding. Whether or not memory retention is essential to defining human consciousness is still in debate. This takes us to the next issue, which deals with the ethics of ending someone's life. It is important to notice that the definition of being conscious is key to determining the continuation of medical support for the "brain dead". It is my guess that the health industry will most likely favor including memory retention of a patient as a qualification to be classified as conscious. I believe this because doing so would be more economically viable for the said industry. However, as human beings, we need to further examine and decide this matter with stronger morals and virtues. The defining the measure of human consciousness will definitely downplay the administration of life support offered to patients in a vegetative state.
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