The Science of Mind Reading

One night in October, 2009, a young man lay in an fMRI scanner in Liège, Belgium. Five years earlier, he'd suffered a head trauma in a motorcycle accident, and since then he hadn't spoken. He was said to be in a "vegetative state." A neuroscientist named Martin Monti sat in the next room, along with a few other researchers. For years, Monti and his postdoctoral adviser, Adrian Owen, had been studying vegetative patients, and they had developed two controversial hypotheses.