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Vegetative Patients Can Still Learn

enigma48 writes to mention that a collaborative study between the Universities of Buenos Aires and Cambridge have demonstrated that individuals in a vegetative state can still learn and demonstrate at least a partial consciousness. Their findings are reported in a recent online edition of Nature Neuroscience. "It is the first time that scientists have tested whether patients in vegetative and minimally conscious states can learn. By establishing that they can, it is believed that this simple test will enable practitioners to assess the patient's consciousness without the need of imaging. The abstract is also available in the advance issue of Nature."

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  1. Re:fMRI Strikes Again by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Probably because your kooky theory does nothing to explain or predict dark matter or the cosmic microwave background

    You're proving my point that the people who are so quick to call the EU bullshit are also not very familiar with it. When I explain why those two are completely false, I want you to be aware of your own hypocrisy and how much you shame yourself by speaking ill of what you know nothing about. If I were you, I'd have done that anonymously too. If you are like almost everyone else who does this, then you will ignore the fact that I have corrected you and will pretend that you didn't see my post. So be it. You'll see it, and I'll know that you saw it, and with that I am satisfied.

    First of all, one of the major points of EU theory is that IT DOES NOT NEED DARK MATTER AT ALL. The difference between EU theory and mainstream theory is that mainstream theory is focused to the point of obsession on gravity and gravitational effects. Now, any physicist or electrical engineer can tell you that gravity is a very weak force, compared to any other. The electric force and electrical attraction/repulsion are many, many orders of magnitude more powerful than gravity. Also, gravity follows the inverse-square law, so it diminishes with the square of the distance - if you double your distance from a gravitational body, the gravity from it that you experience is four times less. Electricity, on the other hand, diminishes linearly - if you double your distance from an electric field, the electric field you experience is half. It's a much more powerful force and one that is more powerful over distances. Thus, the visible matter in the universe that we can see, the regular ordinary non-dark matter, is more than enough to account for what we see in space, with no "extra" source of gravity (dark matter) needed. I hope that now you can see why it's silly to say "but EU doesn't explain or predict dark matter!" and why that instantly told me that you don't have the first clue of what you're talking about. To an EU scientist, dark matter is a "fudge factor" like Ptolomy's epicycles, it was put there only because an equation did not work without it, it has never once been observed or created in a lab, and its presence in a mathematical equation does not give it physical reality. Study Ptolomy's epicycles and you will see how generations of otherwise good scientists can believe in the physical reality of a mathematical falsehood only because their equations couldn't work without that mathematical falsehood.

    For the cosmic microwave background, the EU theory notes that the locations "hot spots" in data like that produed by COBE and WMAP correlate with known locations of filimentary structures of hydrogen. Those filiments are known as Birkeland currents and in fact we can observe the magnetism they produce, either in space at huge scales or in a lab at small scales. What any electrical engineer can tell you is that you need an electric current to account for those magnetic fields. An electric current on that scale is more than capable of producing microwave radiation and there are many, many such currents throughout interstellar space. This also explains why the WMAP data was a "smoother" distribution than was expected, a finding that I believe is what led to the ad-hoc after-the-fact invention of inflation theory. This of course is bad science; a good theory predicts observations in advance, a terrible and rather unscientific theory fails to predict and when the failure is noted, the theory is revised and forced to fit the observation instead of being discarded and replaced. If you don't understand that, I'd suggest studying the works of a scientist named Karl Popper and what he had to say about falsifiability.

    Your first little objection was so trivial to explain that a layman like me has no problem doing so. For the second, you may be interested in this link, which I

  2. Re:fMRI Strikes Again by Hognoxious · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    You're proving my point that the people who are so quick to call the EU bullshit

    The EU is bullshit. It's a bunch of Belgians deciding that cucumbers are too bent and reclassifying carrots as fruit because Estonians make marmalade out of them.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."