LETTER
Selective brain activity in response to one’s own name in the persistent vegetative state
1 Department of Neurology, Christian Doppler Clinic & Center for Neurocognitive Research, Paracelsus Private Medical University, Salzburg, Austria
2 Department of Psychology & Center for Neurocognitive Research, University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria
3 Department of Neurology, Christian Doppler Clinic & Center for Neurocognitive Research, Paracelsus Private Medical University, Salzburg, Austria
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
W Staffen
Department of Neurology, Christian Doppler Clinic, Ignaz Harrer Strasse 79, 5020 Salzburg, Austria; w.staffen@salk.at
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
The persistent vegetative state (PVS) is a condition in which awareness of the self and the environment is absent. However, neuroimaging studies suggest that normal brain activity in response to speech and faces can remain in the PVS, although it is not clear if this activity reflects higher levels of perception and cognitive processes, as only meaningless stimuli were used as control conditions.1 One way to investigate such higher cognitive processes is to examine whether differential activity can be evoked by different contents of language.
We examined brain activity in a patient in the PVS during hearing his own first name compared with another name. Previous studies found activation of the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) in healthy subjects during hearing their own name and self referential processing.2
We investigated the case of a 50-year-old man, who had a myocardial infarction with cardiac arrest in March 2003. The diagnosis of PVS
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