Later, a character named 22—a disembodied soul living in “The Great Before,” a realm where souls are prepared before ...

More fundamentally, though, doctors should not be expected to draw sharp lines between "minimally conscious" and "vegetative state" patients. We are not sure enough to make that call.

Consciousness gives rise to a sense of self and personal agency. The question is, how do biological processes give rise to ...

Minimally conscious state: These patients are also alive, with a severe alteration in consciousness, with intermittent, but inconsistent, behaviors suggesting awareness.

Mind-blowing new research shows that, at least for some cells, death isn’t the end, but the beginning of something entirely ...

Blake Lemoine jumped the gun Three years ago, Google fired the software engineer Blake Lemoine for insisting that a chatbot ...

Opinion: The term “vegetative state” writes off patients as “not even minimally conscious” when medicine is not in a position to make that diagnosis.

Answering the question of when consciousness emerges is deeply tied to the mystery of what it actually is and how it can be ...

A vegetative state is a disorder of consciousness or an altered consciousness. It is caused by severe brain damage. Someone in a persistent vegetative state may look like they’re awake, but they ...

Dr. Joseph Fins and Bioethics program director Dr. Robert Klitzman explore new ethical practices for patients in a coma or a minimally conscious state.