Science Café on brain injury, vegetative states, & consciousness: Another success for FABBS! 

Note: This event was sponsored by the American Psychological Association.

Please scroll down the page to watch videos, download PowerPoint presentations, or view photos from the event.

March 26, 2007: FABBS held  a Science Café entitled “Unraveling the mysteries of the brain and mind in the aftermath of Terri Schiavo & related cases,” at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, DC on March 26, 2007.  This event featured Nicholas Schiff, M.D. (Weill Medical College of Cornell University) and Daniel Wegner, Ph.D. (Harvard University), two of the top scientists in the field.  We are pleased to report that this Café turned into a now-expected, standing-room-only event for the Foundation. 

James Pomerantz, PhD, a professor at Rice University and President of FABBS, welcomed the crowd and served as master of ceremonies for the evening.  In order to frame the evening, Pomerantz made the following statement:

Introduction

“FABBS is a non-profit educational organization whose mission is to inform the public, engaged and interested people like you here today, about fast-breaking developments in the behavioral and brain sciences.  Every day, progress is made in understanding the human mind, in part because of increasingly sophisticated and clever techniques for exploring the mind behaviorally, and in part because of breakthroughs in neuroimaging that allow us to see, in living color, pictures and movies of the brain at work.  As a result, questions that we once thought were unanswerable, seemingly totally subjective, are being brought out into the light and are being squarely addressed and answered.  At FABBS, our job is to help make others aware of this extraordinary level of progress.”

Representatives from the Café sponsor, the American Psychological Association, made brief comments.  Steven Breckler, Ph.D. (Executive Director for Science) distributed copies of booklets on what fMRI is, one version directed at a younger audience and one for adults.  He echoed Pomerantz’s sentiment of the importance of educating the public.  (For a copy of this brochure, visit: http://www.apa.org/science/ or to view the brochure, click here).  Sharon Stephens Brehm, Ph.D., APA’s President, indicated her support for the Café.

PRESENTATIONS

Nicholas Schiff, M.D.

Schiff began by defining various disorders of consciousness, noting that all start with the coma state, and that the use of various neuroimaging methods helps in diagnosis.  There are various levels of vegetative state (e.g., persistent, permanent) but also there exist other categories such as the minimally conscious state, late emergence from the minimally conscious state, and the locked-in state.  Schiff demonstrated the value of neuroimaging and the difficulties and limitations of its use and noted that there is a serious need for a framework for longitudinal assessments.  There are still risks of misdiagnosis, and Schiff suggested that we reconsider professional standards and ethical obligations for brain-injured patients in such areas as right-to-die and right-to-care and providing proper access to therapeutic advances in the field.

To view or download Dr. Schiff’s PowerPoint presentation, click here.

Daniel Wegner, Ph.D.

Wegner explored the difficulty of assessing “other minds,” i.e., examining someone in a given conscious state and deciding if that individual is lucid or not.  He noted that if a loved one is in a vegetative state, sometimes a family member reports “knowing” that the loved one is conscious no matter what the scientific evidence shows.  In order to assess this, Wegner conducted a study, and asked approximately 2,400 experimental subjects to read this brief passage:

“No one really knows what it is like to be a chimp or a robot, but we humans do have some ideas about what other minds are like. This survey asks for you to think about and compare different kinds of minds.  First, you'll meet the characters--a chimp, a robot, a baby, a dog, and other characters who may have minds. Next, you'll pick a survey. Each 10-minute survey is about a mental ability--such as the ability to feel joy, to think, or to feel pain. Your job is to judge pairs of characters to say if one has more of the ability.  We ask you to do each survey only once and without interruption. At the end, you'll learn how you ranked all the characters and how your rankings compare with others we've collected. Then, choose another survey or come back another time!”

Through systematic assessment, these seven features were revealed to be a key to whether a being was judged to have a mind or not: intelligent communication, body, face, motivation, voice, expression, history.  Interestingly, examples like the owl butterfly were used to show that even if there appears to be a face present, the entity being judged gets categorized as having a mind (see slide 30).  Wegner suggested that we would be wise to train ourselves, and others, to understand the dimensions of mind perception.



To view or download Dr. Wegner’s PowerPoint presentation, click here.


Q and A

The question and answer period was lively and informative, carrying into hallway conversations with the speakers and other attendees.  FABBS thanks Drs. Schiff and Wegner for another terrific event, now a third hit in our series of engaging and informative Science Cafés.

To see more pictures of this event, please visit our photo gallery by clicking here.

DVD

If you prefer to receive a DVD copy of this café, which is of a better quality than the web posting, please send in a tax-deductible contribution to FABBS by either check or PayPal for $30 or more, and we will mail you a copy. 

Please indicate that you would like to receive the March 2007 Science Cafe somewhere on your donation.

FABBS donors who have contributed $100 or more in either 2006 or 2007 are eligible for a complimentary copy of this DVD by contacting us.

To read about the prior two Cafés, please click here. To learn about upcoming events please email us with your name and email address.