Martin Monti is somewhat well-known for exploring similar cases: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5741595/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles

Martin Monti is somewhat well-known for exploring similar cases: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5741595/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5741595/. While it seems highly likely that at least some “minimally conscious” patients do, in fact, have much greater interior consciousness than we might have thought, I also think that these stories tend to underemphasize the potentially fragmentary nature of consciousness. A patient who is able to respond to commands to “visualize playing tennis” may be fully and completely conscious, with only a motor defect—or they might be much less conscious than that, but nonetheless able to process spoken commands and trigger relevant neural activity in response. From the few cases I’ve read, it seems like the bandwidth (so to speak) of the “imagine this if yes, that if no” method of communicating via fMRI is far too limited to draw conclusions about exactly what the interior experience of the patient is. Not to say this research isn’t interesting. It’s fascinating. But I do sometimes think it makes the same sort of mistakes Benjamin Libet famously did, in making assumptions about the indivisibility of consciousness.