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Adrian M. Owen, PhD; Martin R. Coleman, PhD; Melanie Boly, MD; Matthew H. Davis, PhD; Steven Laureys, MD; John D. Pickard, MD

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The main question raised by Sarà and colleagues is whether the activation that we observed in our patient when we asked her to perform mental imagery tasks in the functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner could have reflected an "implicit preconscious neural response." For this to be a plausible alternative explanation, Sarà and colleagues would need to provide empirical evidence of the following: (1) the word tennis can produce a statistically significant change in activity in the supplementary motor cortex of a single individual who is not consciously aware; (2) the word house can produce a statistically significant change in activity in anatomically different regions of the brain, including the parietal lobe and the parahippocampal cortices, in the same unconscious individual; and (3) in both cases, these . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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