Summary & Study Guide - Into the Gray Zone

The Borderland Between Life and Death

This book is a summary of “Into the Gray Zone: A Neuroscientist Explores the Border Between Life and Death,” by Adrian Owen.

The “gray zone” is the twilight region between full consciousness and brain death. People with sustained brain injuries or victims of strokes or neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are often in the gray zone. Many of them are oblivious to the outside world, and their doctors and families often believe they are incapable of thought. But 20 percent of them are conscious, although they never respond to any form of external stimulation.

This book tells how Owen pushes forward the boundaries of science, using a variety of brain scans and brain-computer interfaces, to find patients who are in the gray zone and communicate with them. It sheds some light on how we pay attention and remember, and how brain-computer interface technology is changing the prognosis for people with impaired brain function and creating the possibility of telepathy and augmented intelligence.

Read this book and reflect on what these fascinating borderlands between life and death have taught us about being human.

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