The search for consciousness
Open accessAbstract
In recent years, rapid technological developments in the field of neuroimaging have provided new methods for assessing residual cognition, detecting consciousness, and even communicating with patients who clinically appear to be in a vegetative state. Here, I highlight some of the major implications of these developments, discuss their scientific, clinical, legal, and ethical relevance, and make my own recommendations for future directions in this field.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The text we found for this paper looks like another document, so the self-check wasn’t run.
The citation lists haven’t been fetched yet
References 10 · Cited by 61
- Authors
- Owen, A. M.
- Affiliations
- Western University (CA)
- Corresponding author
- Owen, Adrian M.
- ORCID
- Owen, Adrian M.
- Venue
- Neuron
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2019-05
- Volume
- 102
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 526-528
- ISSN
- 0896-6273 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2944376397
- Cited by
- 61
- References
- 10
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 9 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 15 · 2021: 7 · 2020: 7 · 2019: 2
- FWCI
- 5.90
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Neuron (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Scholarship@Western (Western University) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Canada Excellence Research Chairs (CERC) Program
- The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research
- Canadian Institutes of Health Research
- James S. McDonnell Foundation
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Epidemiology › Traumatic Brain Injury Research
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Philosophy and Theoretical Science
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations
- Keywords
- consciousness, vegetative state, minimally conscious state, neuroimaging, brain-computer interface, patient communication, legal and ethical issues, clinical implications
- MeSH terms
- Awareness, Brain, Consciousness, Diagnostic Errors, Electroencephalography, Ethics, Medical, Humans, Life Support Care, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Persistent Vegetative State, Spectroscopy, Near-Infrared, Recovery of Function, Brain Injury, Chronic, Functional Neuroimaging, Brain-Computer Interfaces
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
