What’s dead to you?The researchers Kurt Gray of the University of Maryland's Mind Perception and Morality Lab, together with Annie Knickman and Dan Wegner of Harvard University would like to know. They’ve recently designed an experiment to try and uncover how we perceive those in persistent vegetative states, or PVS. And what they've found so far is astonishing, even perhaps a complete uprooting of zombie studies.The researchers stopped 201 random subjects in public spaces throughout New York and New England. Participants read one of three random, hypothetical short stories. In all three, a man, David, smashes up his car and suffers “serious injuries.” Fates vary – in one, David fully recovers; in another, David dies; and in the third, David's entire brain goes dark, save the one chunk that keeps him breathing. He's alive, by legal standards, but won't ever really come to. David's a vegetable.Subjects were then asked to size up his mental abilities. Could David “influence the outcome of events, know right from wrong, remember incidents from his life, be aware of his environment, possess a personality” or otherwise be emotional? They rated his capacities on a seven-point scale:3 – David can do these things.0 – You don't agree or disagree that he can do these things.-3 – You “strongly disagree” that he can do these things.Gray and his colleagues averaged the results. Recovered David scored 1.77 – no surprise there – while dead David scored -0.29, a surprising rating as it ascribes a “considerable amount” of brainpower to a dead guy. But it gets better. Vegetable David ranked -1.73. It'd be fascinating to see if this phenomenon holds regionally, or even how it shakes out by country. But for the time being, science shows, your average New Yorker or New Englander considers someone on life-support deader than dead.The researchers' first guess was that participants were fixating on the cold, inert shell of the individual in PVS, and by doing so “were seeing less mind” in him than the dead. A follow-up study tested this by offering two contrasting endings to the tragedy of dead David. In one, he simply expires. The other points the subject's attention to his reposed corpse, saying: “After being embalmed at the morgue, he was buried in the local cemetery. David now lies in a coffin underground.” This follow up used the same seven-point spectrum, though it also asked subjects to rate their religiosity.Regardless of religious intensity, participants again saw vegetable David as somehow having less mind than “passed away” David. (To be sure, scores for dead David's mind in the embalmed-and-buried version varied with subject religiosity.) Non-religious participants ranked the buried corpse similarly to the mental acuity of the vegetative patient – -1.51 and -1.64, respectively. But religious participants “continued to ascribe less mind” (-1.57) to the “irretrievably unconscious” David than to his interred corpse (0.59).Incidentally, research reported last year shows more traces of thought in those in a vegetative state than previously, um, thought. But Gray and Knickman and Wegner have unearthed a deep irony behind the efforts to keep those still-living people “alive.”ViaThe Economist.Reach this writer at brian@motherboard.tv.
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