Now hang on there just a sec! NOO hooking up jumper-cables to old Uncle Elmer’s noggin just yet there, young whippersnappers!
In another step, along with fMRI, toward detecting the actual “You” inside your physical head, or at least some kind of activity much more likely, Marcello Mastroianni Massimini and his colleagues have flipped around an existing tool, mixed it up with some fancy maths, and turned it into a test to find how much, if any consciousness is still rattling around in your brain.
-Regardless of your outside physical state.
[yes. before you even say it. this scale categorizes almost every d-list celebutard you’ve heard about as immediately at-bat for organ-donation.]
And though it would make stiff-upper-lip-crushing stories like RadioLab’s “Finding Emilie” completely obsolete, the doctors have even devised a specific Numerical Scale that shows, more-or-less, about how much brain activity there is going on.
It ranges from about 0.2 for the average stoner hippie, all the way up past 0.6 for Too Much Coffee Man.
If their idea does make it into heavy rotation when paired with the standard Trans-Cranial-Magnetic-Stimulation device, perhaps Accidental or Unnecessary “Pull-The-Plug” moments will be a thing of the past.
…
And yet, we may then become saddled with even more heartbreaking decisions going forward.
-That-is if pulling the plug on someone with a high-enough consciousness score (PCI) remains an on-the-table option at all by that point.
More Details At The Links Below.
Photo Credits:
“Some radar and radio antennas”, by Rodolfo Belloli
Links:
• Source: ScienceMag.org
• More Coverage: National Monitor | Bloomberg | Mayo Clinic-Trans-Cranial Magnetic Stimulation | IMDB-Marcello Mastroianni | HT-Brain Typing | Wikipedia-I Think, Therefore: I Am…
Leave a Reply