It must have been like being buried alive, for decades: a car accident left a Belgian man in a coma, diagnosed as being in a vegetative state...but he was actually conscious, while totally paralyzed, for 23 years.
"I screamed, but there was no one to hear," he says in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel. Three years ago, neurologist Steven Laureys used modern scanning techniques to discover that Houben's cerebral cortex was, in fact, functioning.
The awful tale reads like a nineteenth-century horror narrative, perhaps a Blackwood's story of extreme experience (cf Poe's hilarious parody and analysis):
I am called Rom. I am not dead. The nurses came, they patted me, they sometimes took my hand, and I heard them say "no hope." I meditated, I dreamed my life away—it was all I could do.
But is this true, or is the recovery a fiction adding another layer of horror to reality?
Perhaps the story is based on a different kind of horror. James Randi and others have noted that "facilitated communication" [FC], whereby another person helps a disabled one use a keyboard, the means by which Houber expresses himself, has often been criticized for adding content that isn't there.
This FC claim is simply untrue, a farce, a lie – and the “facilitator” knows it! And no, this man is not going to write a book, but the "facilitator" is, and if this humbug is not stopped, she'll make a fortune doing so. Put a stop to this, someone!"
If the FC is bogus, what kind of consciousness is housed in that coma-sapped brain?
(via Arnaud Leene)
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