Awakening coma victims using brainwave patterns

[mr d]

would there be the possibilty of recording the neuro-electrical calls made to the brain by persons waking from sleep, and derieving a pattern from such data. then use it to stimulate or use as playback introduced into the brains of coma victims to induce wakefulness.

yes i understand moral implications, but as a measure of last resort. would imagine patterns developed from siblings and parents of coma victim would provide best source.

 

strange thoughts

mr d

[LucidDreamer]

I think you are making too much of the brainwave data collected from eeg machines. They do not measure anything near specific enough that you could identify somebody from them. The eegs only collect very general information about brain activity. It is an interesting thought though. Maybe sound waves can be made that have alpha patterns in them to see if it will induce coma patients to wake up.

[ashennell]

I think it would be interesting to see if there is some means of pulling people out of a coma using electrical stimulation or otherwise. However, a coma is not similar to sleep at all. Most people in a coma have a huge amount of brain damage so its not clear that they could remain conscious or that there brain could actually do anything useful once awake. In some cases this could be useful though.

[Nezumi]

This is very interesting and something to consider.

From what I understand, you are describing a way to use neural signals that preexisted and put them back so that things are the same as they use to be.

 

In other words, when someone is in a coma certain connections in the brain are lost or not very active, or some chemicals/atoms are very off track.

 

Your hypothesis is that when someone has all these things put back into order then they shall awake from the coma?

 

For this to happen, a recorded format of how their brain signals and chemical pathways were already set-up would have to be done. Thus, there would be something to look back at to see what needs to be reopened, connected, and transferred.

 

I assume doing things such as this become ethical to put someone to sleep after recording signals, however I believe there would be much information to be discovered so that afterwards, the recording would be unnecessary.