http://goo.gl/fcsZE9
The film, an 1961 episode of the TV show Alfred Hitchcock Presentsthat had been condensed down to 8 minutes, is a study in suspense. In it, a 5-year-old totes a partially loaded revolver — which she thinks is a toy — around her suburban neighbourhood, shouting “bang” each time she aims at someone and squeezes the trigger.
One behaviourally non-responsive person, a 20-year-old woman, showed patterns of brain activity only in sensory areas. But another person, a 34-year-old man who has been in a vegetative state since he was 18, had patterns of brain activity in the executive and sensory brain areas, similarly to that of the healthy subjects.
“It was actually indistinguishable from a healthy participant watching the movie,” says Adrian Owen, a neuroscientist at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada (see: 'Neuroscience: The mind reader').