Dr. Christof (Christoph) Koch

Or you may not be able to see anymore.

Now, what is it you want?

And most people, to those people that you can communicate, like they did a study in Israel with locked-in patients.

So these are patients that have a stroke at the level of the pons, where they're typically most of their motor commands, they can't execute anymore except, you know, some neck and some vertical eye movements.

And they ask them because they can't communicate.

And most of them, except the ones that have chronic pain, most of them want to continue to live.

Although before when you would have asked him, you would have said, no, no way.

And so it's difficult with this medical directive because you don't know until you get there.

Resilience.

Well, there's also this phenomenon of akinetic mutism that's also found in lesion, that area where people seem to have completely lost their will to do anything at all.

They just sit there all day, and they don't say anything.

They've lost essentially their will...

do or say anything.

And if you inject them with dopamine or others, then sometimes they retrieve and you ask them, why was it?

I just had no desire.

Do we know what brain area is involved in this case?

Yeah.

It's a cingulate.

Well, so based on the study of your colleague, Joseph Parvizi, right, at Stanford, we know if you go a little bit back into the posterior cingulate, that's where you have the sense of self.

If you stimulate there or in these people who have epileptic seizures in there, right, they have these weird symptoms.