THE STORY OF A 23-year-old woman in a deep “persistent vegetative state” (PVS) made a splash in the news this past Friday, claiming headlines in the Washington Post, New York Times, BBC, CNN, and MSNBC, among other places. Why did this woman–deemed a “vegetable” after a car crash last year–merit such attention? Because new brain scans proved that the woman did indeed have a mental life. As MSNBC put it, “Car-crash victim startles doctors by mentally imagining tennis strokes.”

A team of European scientists asked the disabled 23-year-old to imagine herself playing tennis. While asking the question, they scanned her brain using fMRI imagers. They then compared her brain scans to a control group of healthy adults asked the same question. The results were shocking, for they revealed that the same parts of the brain were lighting up in the car-crash victim as in the control group. The same results came in for both, time after time, for a number of other questions and mental tasks. The resulting brain scans of the PVS patient and the control group were “indistinguishable.”