In 1983, Belgian engineering student and martial arts enthusiast Houben, then 20, was in a car accident that was thought to have left him in a vegetative state. Doctors relied on the widely-used Glasgow Coma Scale, assessing his eyes, verbal, and motor responses. What they failed to notice was that Houben was actually conscious—but completely paralyzed.

"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 doctor has only just now made Houben's story public.)

Houben, who communicates via a computer with a special keyboard activated with the slightest movement of his right hand, is now 46. He has spent more than half his life trapped in his own body, and says he only survived this excruciating existence by dreaming himself away. In the interview, this is what he typed:

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. I don't want to blame anyone—it wouldn't do any good. But I owe my life to my family. Everyone else gave up.

I studied what happened around me as if it were a tiny piece of world drama, the bizarre peculiarities of the other patients in the common room, the entry of the doctors into my room, the gossip of the nurses who were not embarrassed to speak about their boyfriends in front of "the extinct one." That made me an expert on relationships.

According to Laureys, Houben's case may be far more common than we'd like to think. The doctor, who leads the Coma Science Group and Department of Neurology at Liege University Hospital, says that while Houben's doctors were "not good," he's not sure better ones using this same coma scale would have detected brain activity either:

In Germany alone each year some 100,000 people suffer from severe traumatic brain injury. About 20,000 are followed by a coma of three weeks or longer. Some of them die, others regain health. But an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 people a year remain trapped in an intermediate stage—they go on living without ever coming back again.

In his paper, Laureys writes that in about 40 percent of "vegetative state" cases he has analyzed, current brain scanning techniques reveal signs of varying levels of consciousness. A case is being made, it seems, to stop relying on the Glasgow Coma Scale and start looking more closely at brain scanning images.

This story originally appeared on CNET

This is the second part of the research. The previous one—from 1992—showed how some brain parts used less glucose as the subjects get more experienced with the game. This new study—which has been paid by the marketing company for Tetris, but peer-reviewed. and published by the journal BMC Research Notes—uses new, more precise imaging techniques to check for brain changes. The target population was adolescent girls, during a three month period. According to Haier, adolescent girls' brains are still developing. Obviously, boys' brains stop functioning properly around age ten.

The study found that the parts in blue where more efficient, while the ones in red got thicker, and stronger, resulting in a more agile, powerful game. [Discover via Neatorama]

The man first lost his ability to speak after head trauma caused extensive bleeding into the pons area of his brain stem. BU researchers loaded him into a fMRI machine and asked him to attempt to produce specific vowels. After determining that his brain still worked regularly, they implanted an electrode directly onto its speech production parts.

The electrode itself is a marvel of science, containing neurotrophic factors which allow tissue to grown into and around it. While it sounds kind of gross, this stabilizes the electrode and allows it to reside long-term in the brain. It can only sense vowels right now, but the BU team is hoping that this type of technology will let mutes produce words directly in five years or so. [The Future of Things]