Rom Houben, a Belgian man whom doctors believed to have been in a coma for 23 years following a car crash in 1983, was conscious all the time: we know because Houben himself has told us, in several media interviews conducted over the last few days.

Doctors in Zolder, Belgium, had repeatedly diagnosed Houben using the internationally accepted Glasgow Coma Scale to assess his eye, verbal and motor responses. But each time he was incorrectly graded as being in a vegetative state, reported the Daily Mail.

It was only when Steven Laureys, a doctor and researcher at the University of Liège, scanned Houben's brain in 2006 and discovered it was still working, although his body was paralysed, that doctors began to realize he may be conscious.

Now 46, Houben told the BBC that he had to learn to be patient. He was very angry at first when he realized other people had an opinion of him that was rather pathetic, but he had to learn to be patient, he said.

Intense physiotherapy for the last three years has been helping him regain some movement, reports the Guardian.

Houben said he realized when he came round after his accident that his body was paralyzed, and while he could hear everything the doctors were saying, he couldn't communicate with them.

"I screamed, but there was nothing to hear," said Houben.

"I dreamed myself away," he added, using one finger on a computer touchscreen attached to his wheelchair. The computer is also fitted with a special device that allows him to read books while lying down, reported the Daily Mail.

Houben said he just spent the time dreaming of a better life.

"Frustration is too small a word to describe what I felt." he said.

Houben's paralysis was the result of his brain being starved of oxygen when his heart stopped for a few minutes.

A former engineering student who speaks four languages, Houben said he coped by meditating, according to a Guardian report.

He told his doctors that sometimes he was only his consciousness and "nothing else" as he travelled with his thoughts into the past or "into another existence".

When the doctors discovered he was not in a vegetative state, Houben described feeling reborn:

"It was my second birth," he said.

By the year 2020, you won't need a keyboard and mouse to control your computer, say Intel Corp. researchers. Instead, users will open documents and surf the Web using nothing more than their brain waves.

Scientists at Intel's research lab in Pittsburgh are working to find ways to read and harness human brain waves so they can be used to operate computers, television sets and cell phones. The brain waves would be harnessed with Intel-developed sensors implanted in people's brains.

The scientists say the plan is not a scene from a sci-fi movie -- Big Brother won't be planting chips in your brain against your will. Researchers expect that consumers will want the freedom they will gain by using the implant.

"I think human beings are remarkable adaptive," said Andrew Chien, vice president of research and director of future technologies research at Intel Labs. "If you told people 20 years ago that they would be carrying computers all the time, they would have said, 'I don't want that. I don't need that.' Now you can't get them to stop [carrying devices]. There are a lot of things that have to be done first but I think [implanting chips into human brains] is well within the scope of possibility."

Intel research scientist Dean Pomerleau told Computerworld that users will soon tire of depending on a computer interface, and having to fish a device out of their pocket or bag to access it. He also predicted that users will tire of having to manipulate an interface with their fingers.

Instead, they'll simply manipulate their various devices with their brains.

"We're trying to prove you can do interesting things with brain waves," said Pomerleau. "Eventually people may be willing to be more committed ... to brain implants. Imagine being able to surf the Web with the power of your thoughts."

To get to that point Pomerleau and his research teammates from Intel, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, are currently working on decoding human brain activity.

Pomerleau said the team has used Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI) machines to determine that blood flow changes in specific areas of the brain based on what word or image someone is thinking of. People tend to show the same brain patterns for similar thoughts, he added.

For instance, if two people think of the image of a bear or hear the word bear or even hear a bear growl, a neuroimage would show similar brain activity. Basically, there are standard patterns that show up in the brain for different words or images.

Pomerleau said researchers are close to gaining the ability to build brain sensing technology into a head set that could be used to manipulate a computer. The next step is development of a tiny, far less cumbersome sensor that could be implanted inside the brain.

Such brain research isn't limited to Intel and its university partners.

Almost two years ago, scientists in the U.S. and Japan announced that a monkey's brain was used to to control a humanoid robot. Miguel Nicolelis, a professor of neurobiology at Duke University and lead researcher on the project, said that researchers were hoping its work would help paralyzed people walk again.

And a month before that, a scientist at the University of Arizona reported that he had successfully built a robot that is guided by the brain and eyes of a moth. Charles Higgins, an associate professor at the university, predicted that in 10 to 15 years people will be using "hybrid" computers running a combination of technology and living organic tissue.

Today, Intel's Pomerleau said various research facilities are developing technologies to sense activity from inside the skull.

"If we can get to the point where we can accurately detect specific words, you could mentally type," he added. "You could compose characters or words by thinking about letters flashing on the screen or typing whole words rather than their individual characters."

Pomerleau also noted that the more scientists figure out about the brain, it will help them design better microprocessors. He said, "If we can see how the brain does it, then we could build smarter computers."

A Canadian woman claims she has lost her health benefits after her insurance company used her Facebook pictures as evidence that she was no longer depressed.

Nathalie Blanchard had been on sick leave for a year from her job at IBM in Bromont, Quebec, after being diagnosed with severe depression. The 29-year old was receiving sick pay from insurer Manulife.

However, when payments stopped coming she contacted Manulife and, she claims, was told that Facebook () pictures taken on a beach and during a night out were evidence that she was no longer depressed.

According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., which also produced a TV report on the case:

When Blanchard called Manulife, the company said that “I’m available to work, because of Facebook”…She said her insurance agent described several pictures Blanchard posted on the popular social networking site, including ones showing her having a good time at a Chippendales bar show, at her birthday party and on a sun holiday — evidence that she is no longer depressed, Manulife said.

…in a written statement sent to CBC News, the insurer said: “We would not deny or terminate a valid claim solely based on information published on websites such as Facebook.” It confirmed that it uses the popular social networking site to investigate clients.

It’s a case that adds fuel to the privacy debate, especially given that Blanchard claims her Facebook photos were private. Are we entering an unsettling new reality in which insurance companies are able to deny claims based on Tweets and Facebook pictures?

Deep in the bowels of the internet, I came across an exhaustive list of interesting Wikipedia articles by Ray Cadaster. It’s brilliant reading when you’re bored, so I got his permission to post the top 50 here.

Bookmark it, start reading, and become that person who’s always full of fascinating stuff you never knew about.

The top 50 Wikipedia articles by interestingness

1. Marree Man
2. War Plan Red
3. Vela Incident
4. Tybee Bomb
5. United States Numbered Highways
6. Wow! Signal
7. Tube Bar Prank Calls
8. Kola Superdeep Borehole
9. Back to the Future Timeline
10. Year Without a Summer
11. K Foundation Burn a Million Quid
12. Sokal Affair
13. Blue Peacock
14. Veerappan
15. Person From Porlock
16. Eternal Flame
17. U.S. Color-Coded War Plans
18. The Wedge (Border)
19. Mohave Phone Booth
20. Stanislav Petrov
21. Valery Sablin
22. The Man on the Clapham Omnibus
23. Special Atomic Demolition Munition
24. Piracy in the Strait of Malacca
25. Prometheus (tree)
26. Zone of Alienation
27. Fan Death
28. Outlawries Bill
29. Raymond Robinson (Green Man)
30. Scoville Scale
31. Kardashev Scale
32. Larry Walters
33. Joshua A. Norton
34. Fabergé egg
35. Issei Sagawa
36. Joseph Jagger
37. Traumatic Insemination
38. James Joseph Dresnok
39. Ivy League Nude Posture Photos
40. Jim Corbett (Hunter)
41. Just-World Phenomenon
42. Nicholas Bourbaki
43. Humanzee
44. Old Man of the Lake
45. Alexamenos Graffito
46. Fairy Chess Piece
47. Michael Fagan Incident
48. ETAOIN SHRDLU
49. Palomares Hydrogen Bomb Incident
50. As Slow as Possible

*Copybot is not responsible for the hours and hours that disappeared while you were exploring this list. But she is responsible for the fascinated responses you get at the water cooler tomorrow.

Edit: If you enjoyed this list, I’ve since posted 50 more of Wikipedia’s most interesting articles. The second list is less war-focused than this one.

Neurophilosophy has an excellent piece on 'time-space' synaesthesia where affected individuals experience units of time - such as hours, days, or months - as occupying specific locations in space relative to their own body.

The image on the right is taken from a BBC News article on time-space synaesthesia and was drawn by one lady to illustrate how days of the week appear to her.

However, Neurophilosophy piece covers two new studies, one on a person with synaesthesia who experiences months in the space around her body in the form of a '7' shape:

Michelle Jarick of the Synaesthesia Research Group at the University of Waterloo in Ontario and her colleagues describe the case of an individual whose time-space synaesthesia has a previously undescribed feature. Like other time-space synaesthetes, the 21-year-old individual, known as L, experiences the time of day and the months of the year as being represented in the space around her body. She experiences the hours of the day in the form of a large "clock face", and her mental calender consists of a giant number "7", which extends for approximately 1 meter around her waist, and on which the months of the year are arranged.

Both of the studies covered in the article demonstrate a crucial technique in synaesthesia research - in part, a demonstration that the effect is a genuine cross-over of the senses.

The general technique is the same no matter what form of synaesthesia you're testing. It involves finding a task which will be changed by the triggered sense but not (or not so much) by the original perception.

For example, with the lady who drew the layout of her months in the image above, October appears on her right and July appears on her left.

So if you did a reaction task that involved indicating what side a word appeared on, you'd expect someone with this form of synaesthesia to do worse when October appeared on the left and July appeared on the right, owing to the confusion caused by the unfamiliar associations, or better when they appeared on the expected sides.

This form of study, where synaesthesia can be shown to improve or worsen performance on other tasks related mostly to the triggered perception is the basis of much research in this area, and the Neurophilosophy piece outlines how these two new studies have shown how time-space fusion is associated with better abilities in understanding time and space.

—Vaughan.

Link to Neurophilosophy on 'The cognitive benefits of time-space synaesthesia'.

Link to BBC News on time-space synaesthesia.

Italian researchers assessed 195 patients with MS, using a range of scales that measure anger, depression and anxiety, and then compared them with the general population.

They were surprised by the results, which showed that while patients experienced almost twice the normal level of withheld anger and exerted low levels of control on their anger, their expressed anger levels were similar to the general population.

This, together with the fact that the elevated withheld anger levels were not related to the severity of the patients' MS, suggests that these inconsistent changes were caused by nervous system damage, rather than an emotional reaction to the stress of the disease.

"We believe that the higher levels of withheld anger shown by the study subjects is due to demyelination, loss of the substance in the white matter that insulates the nerve endings and helps people receive and interpret messages from the brain" explains lead researcher Dr Ugo Nocentini from the IRCCS S Lucia Foundation in Rome.

"The way we process anger is controlled by complex interconnections between the subcortical and cortical systems, notably the amygdale and basal ganglia and the medial prefrontal cortex. We believe that the demyelination process that causes the root symptoms of MS also disrupts the pathways that control how we deal with withheld anger."

The patients who took part in the study comprised 150 with relapsing-remitting MS and 45 with progressive MS. More than two-thirds (68 per cent) were women, the average age of the participants was 40 and the average time since diagnosis was 11 years.

Researchers evaluated the participants using the State Trait Anger Expression Inventory, the Chicago Multiscale Depression Inventory and the State Trait Anxiety Inventory.

The researchers then looked at age and sex-matched subjects in the general population and identified the levels of anger experienced by the 25 per cent of people with the highest scores.

They found that MS patients:

• Were more than twice as likely to experience high levels of withheld anger, with 60 per cent of patients recording the same high levels as the top 25 per cent of the general population.
• Exerted a low level of control on their anger, with just 11 per cent of patients reporting the same high levels of control compared to the top 25 per cent of the general population.
• Were about the same as non MS patients when it came to expressed anger, with 30 per cent of patients reporting the same high levels as the top 25 per cent of the general population.

During the study the authors also compared the anger scores against selected demographic and clinical characteristics and found they were independent of age, education, disease duration and course, disability and fatigue severity. The only notable difference was that women reported higher levels of current anxiety.

"Our findings clearly show that anger characteristics in MS patients differ from those observed in the general population and the overall results surprised the research team" concludes Dr Nocentini.

"For example, patients reported low levels of anger control and high levels of withheld anger, yet the scores for expressed anger were similar to those of the general population.

"We would have expected greater consistency between withheld and expressed anger and higher levels of expressed anger as a consequence of low anger control."

The authors conclude that damage to the fibres in the areas of the brain where anger issues are processed is the most logical explanation. They also say the findings have important implications for clinical practice.

"Anger disrupts interpersonal relationships and this is particularly true for withheld anger, which might go unrecognised by other people" says Dr Nocentini. "Witheld anger has been reported to be associated with physical problems, in particular high blood pressure and vascular disorders, and may have a negative effect on the general health of MS patients.

"Because withheld anger has no, or few, overt manifestations, and is unlikely to be recognised by clinicians or reported by patients, it is important that MS patients are asked if they experience abnormal anger."

I've just found a remarkable 1963 study [pdf] from the Archives of Opthalmology in which 24 blind participants took LSD to see if they could experience visual hallucinations.

It turns out, they can, although this seems largely to be the case in blind people who had several years of sight to begin with, but who later lost their vision.

Those blind from a very early age (younger than two years-old) did not report visual hallucinations, probably because they never had enough visual experience to shape a fully-functioning visual system when their brain was still developing.

It is evident that a normal retina is not needed for the occurrence of LSD-induced visual experiences. These visual experiences do not seem to differ from the hallucinations reported by normal subjects after LSD.

Such phenomena occurred only in blind subjects who reported prior visual activity. The drug increased the frequency of visual events such as spots, lights, dots, and flickers. However, the complex visual experiences reported by 3 subjects after LSD did not occur after placebo or in ordinary experience.

It is interesting to note that duration of blindness was not related to the occurrence of visual hallucinations; nor was intelligence, acuity of visual memory, or use of visual imagery in speech.

I mentioned in an earlier post on auditory hallucinations in deaf people that I'd heard rumours of studies on LSD in blind people but never found any reports. This study is not the only one it seems. The paper reviews several other studies in the same area.

Three other reports deal with the effects of hallucinogenic drugs on blind subjects. Alema reported that 50 micrograms of orally administered LSD induced elaborate visual hallucinations in a subject with bilateral enucleations of the eyeball. However, the effects of 50 micrograms of LSD are stated to have persisted for the incredibly long period of 5 days (they usually last 6 hours). This subject was noted to have spontaneous visual activity.

Zador administered mescaline orally in doses of 0.05 to 0.4gm to 10 blind subjects. Elaborate visual hallucinations usually followed. Most of the subjects had prior spontaneous visual activity, but it is difficult to evaluate this activity because they also had central nervous system diseases. The presence or absence of light perception was not specified for this group, and no control studies were carried out.

Forrer and Goldnerr gave LSD, 1 microgram per kilogram to 2 blind volunteers, both of whom had suffered destruction of the optic nerves. Neither reported visual hallucinations, no mention was made of prior spontaneous hallucinations, and no mention was made of prior spontaneous visual activity.

—Vaughan.

pdf of full text of study.
Link to PubMed entry for study.

Authors Robin J. Tanner (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Kurt A. Carlson (Duke University) uncovered a specific process that they believe contributes to unrealistic optimism. They also suggest a method to encourage consumers to think more realistically about their future actions.

"Consumers adopt the tentative hypothesis that they will behave in an ideal fashion when predicting their future behavior," the authors explain. "Unrealistic optimism by consumers may have negative consequences for both marketers and consumers. For example, if a consumer holds unrealistically optimistic beliefs about how often they will work out in the future, then they may overpay for home exercise equipment."

In a series of studies, the authors first had participants provide idealized estimates for particular behaviors (e.g., In an ideal world, how often would you exercise next week?) Then they asked participants to provide a second estimate (e.g. How often will you exercise next week?). They found that when people are first asked to predict what would happen in an ideal world, then asked how they actually expect to do, they are more realistic.

Interestingly, when researchers explicitly instructed participants not to be idealistic, the experiment backfired and led to even more unrealistic estimates.

Also, the authors found that more decisive people were less realistic.

"An important potential consequence of being overly optimistic about one's future behavior is that such optimistic beliefs may contribute to overbuying of products that see little use," the authors write.

Using previously collected data from the late 1970s, the researchers looked at almost 200 children ages 3 to 9 in Belize, Kenya, Nepal, and American Samoa. When the data were collected, these four communities differed in the availability of resources that are typically associated with modernity, such as having writing tablets and books, electricity, a home-based water supply, a radio and TV set, and a car.

Children in communities with more modern resources performed better in some areas of cognitive functioning, such as certain types of memory and pattern recognition, and they took part in more complex sequences of play. The researchers note that these differences don't mean that children from more modern communities are more advanced intellectually; rather, the findings reflect the cognitive skills that are valued and promoted in the communities where the children live.

"Childhood is changing rapidly around the world," according to Mary Gauvain, professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, and the study's lead author. "Increased urbanization; massive shifts in economic, political, and social conditions; and changes in how we communicate have a significant impact on children's everyday lives. Better understanding of how intellectual development is shaped and directed by the forces of modernization can give us insights into the psychological consequences of globalization."

The investigators chose to examine children from 3 to 9 because they wanted to explore the shift in cognitive performance and social responsibility that occurs in most children between ages 5 and 7, regardless of where they live. In the study, they also explored the role of the Flynn effect, which asserts that there's been a rise in performance on certain parts of IQ tests over the past several generations due to modernization. This study showed that such changes reflect the presence of certain modern resources.