Modern medicine enables us to keep many people alive after they have suffered severe brain damage and show no reliable outward signs of consciousness. Many such patients are misdiagnosed as being in a permanent vegetative state when they are actually in a minimally conscious state. This mistake has far-reaching implications for treatment and prognosis. To alleviate this problem, neuroscientists have recently developed new brain-scanning methods to detect consciousness in some of these patients and even to ask them questions, including "Do you want to stay alive?"Finding Consciousness: The Neuroscience, Ethics, and Law of Severe Brain Damage addresses many questions regarding these recent neuroscientific methods: Is what these methods detect really consciousness? Do patients feel pain? Should we decide whether or not to let them die or are they competent to decide for themselves? And which kinds of treatment should governments and hospitals make available? This edited volume provides contextual information, surveys the issues and positions, and takes controversial stands from a wide variety of prominent contributors in fields ranging from neuroscience and neurology to law and policy to philosophy and ethics. Finding Consciousness should interest not only neuroscientists, clinicians, and ethicists but anyone who might suffer brain damage, which includes us all.

1 - Finding Consciousness: An IntroductionBy Meghan Brayton and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong2 - Discussion with a Caring FatherBy Ken Diviney and Katherine GrichnikPART I: Consciousness3 - The Geography of Unconsciousness: From Apparent Death to the Minimally Conscious StateBy Jeffrey Baker4 - Consciousness and Death: The Whole-Brain Formulation of DeathBy James L. Bernat5 - Modes of ConsciousnessBy Tim Bayne and Jakob HohwyPART II: Diagnosis6 - What is it like to be in a Disorder of ConsciousnessBy Caroline Schnakers7 - Decoding Thoughts in Behaviorally Non-Responsive PatientsBy Adrian Owen and Lorina Naci8 - Persistent Vegetative State, Akinetic Mutism, and ConsciousnessBy Will Davies and Neil LevyPART III: Ethics9 - Lay Attitudes to Withdrawal of Treatment in Disorders of Consciousness and Their Normative SignificanceBy Jacob Gipson, Guy Kahane, and Julian Savulescu10 - Moral Conflict in the Minimally Conscious StateBy Joshua Shepherd11 - What's Good for Them? Best Interests and Severe Disorders of ConsciousnessBy Jennifer Hawkins12 - Minimally Conscious States and Pain: A Different Approach to Patient EthicsBy Valerie Gray HardcastlePART IV: Law13 - The Legal Circle of LifeBy Nita Farahany and Rachel Zacharias14 - Guardianship and the Injured Brain: Representation and the Rights of Patients and FamiliesBy Joseph Fins and Barbara PohlReferencesIndex