Who ever thought technology would allow us to read minds. While it is true that we may not be able to communicate direct sentences, today's technology does allow us to detect when someone is using a certain part of his/her brain. Not only does this help scientists learn more about what we use each part of the brain for, but it has also become useful in detecting consciousness. Consciousness is described in our book as "our subjective experience of the world and ourselves." It includes things like the voice inside one's head, one's emotions, and one's actions. Brain function might seem like an implausible way to detect if someone's "still in there," but the key is in the word "action." The thing that I found most surprising from the BBC video "Horizon - The Secret You" was that people still activate the same areas of their brain when thinking about an activity as when they're actually doing it. Because scientists can measure brain activity, the only thing a person has to do to prove his/her consciousness is respond to a command with his/her brain. Scientists can see (as shown in the picture) if the correct parts of the brain (if any) are responding to the given command.
Great article on a very interesting idea. While reading this I kept thinking about the video we saw in class about the guy playing the video game and then sleeping to see if sleep helped his performance. It sounds like just the mere thought of an activity can make you better at it. Let's use tennis as the example. While one is playing tennis, a person uses a specific part of their brain, right? Then if that person can best re-create the experience they had while playing at another time away from a tennis court, can they become better at tennis even if they aren't playing the game?? If so, it can bring training to a whole new level and maybe someday see a whole new breed of athlete...all hypothetical of course.