How to Communicate When You are Totally Paralyzed

Dialjupiter by myrte­peert

Imag­ine that you are par­a­lyzed. Not just your legs, not just up to your neck, but full-on paral­y­sis. You are a help­less pris­oner in your own body. Your mind is com­pletely intact and alert, but you can­not roll over, you can­not touch your nose, you can­not move your lips, you can­not even blink on com­mand. With­out move­ment, your abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate is nonex­is­tent. You can per­ceive what is around you, but you can­not express. It’s actu­ally a very scary thought that some peo­ple are forced to live their lives in such a help­less state.

This med­ical prob­lem, known as “locked-in-syndrome”…

Some peo­ple with locked-in-syndrome can com­mu­ni­cate by blink­ing or mov­ing their eyes. Jean-Dominique Bauby wrote a book called The Div­ing Bell and the But­ter­fly by hav­ing some­one sit next to him and slowly recite the alpha­bet. Bauby would blink his left eye when the per­son said the let­ter he needed.

But oth­ers are so locked-in they can’t even blink. A recent arti­cle in New Sci­en­tist describes a 46-year-old woman who was totally locked-in. Her doc­tor, Dr. Bir­baumer, wanted to ask her if she’d like to have elec­trodes implanted in her brain to help her com­mu­ni­cate, but they couldn’t fig­ure out a way for the woman to answer.

As this post from the ever-interesting Mind Hacks explains, a solu­tion came by way of an elec­tron­ics store and the pH of our saliva…

Yel­low Lemon by >x<

Walk­ing past an elec­tron­ics store one day, Birbaumer’s col­league Bar­bara Wil­helm spot­ted a med­ical device for mea­sur­ing the pH of saliva, and had an idea. They trained the woman to change the acid­ity of her spit by imag­in­ing either the taste of lemon, or the taste of milk. She learned to push the pH one way to say “yes”, the other to say “no”.

Mind Hacks: Locked in with the bit­ter taste of lemon via Boing Boing