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This is an audio long read from nature.

In this episode, how to detectect Consciousness in People, Animals, and maybe even AI.

Written by Mariana Lanaro and read by me, Benjamin Thompson.

In late 2005, five months after a car accident, a 23-year-old woman lay unresponsive in a hospital bed.

She had a severe brain injury and showed no sign of awareness. But when researchers scanning her

brain asked her to imagine playing tennis, something striking happened.

Brain areas linked to movement lit up on her scan.

The experiment conceived by neuroscientist Adrian Owen and his colleagues suggested that the woman understood the instructions and decided to cooperate,

despite appearing to be unresponsive.

Owen, now at Western University in London, Canada, and his colleagues had introduced a new way

to test for consciousness.

Whereas some previous tests relied on observing general brain activity, this strategy zeroed in on activity directly linked to a researcher's verbal command.

The strategy has since been applied to hundreds of unresponsive people, revealing that many maintain an inner life and are aware of the world around them,

at least to some extent. A 2024 study found that one in four people who were physically

...