Nearly four decades after a catastrophic car accident left 17-year-old Ian Berg with a severe brain injury, new science has revealed he's part of a hidden population: patients who have some level of consciousness but are unable to move or speak. Doctors deemed him "vegetative," a label his mother Eve rejected as an "unhuman-type classification." She brought him home, overseeing years of experimental therapies—from "patterning" regimens to alternative healers—at their sprawling Rainbow Lodge in upstate New York. And "she held on to a mother's belief that Ian could understand everything around him." And as Sarah Zhang writes for the Atlantic, Eve was, in some respects, right.
New brain-imaging research now identifies a subset of patients like Ian with "covert awareness": though outwardly unresponsive, their brain activity shows they have some level of awareness—an ability to see, hear, or understand in some fashion. A 2023 study (which Ian was a part of) found about 25% of unresponsive brain-injury patients fall into this category, suggesting that tens of thousands of people in the US might be quietly aware. Zhang digs into how scientists landed at this conclusion: by putting some patients in an fMRI machine and monitoring brain activity.
In one 2010 instance, a minimally conscious 22-year-old was asked five factual yes-or-no questions while in an fMRI machine; he was asked to picture himself playing tennis if his answer was yes, or walking through his home if no—two activities that would light up two distinct parts of the brain. Based on his brain activity, he got every question right. Zhang's piece is well worth a read in full: She delves far more into Ian's particular story, the stories of other patients, and the "profound questions" the findings raise "about our ethical obligation to people with severe brain injuries." (Read it here.) (This content was created with the help of AI. Read our AI policy.)
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