Telepathy, sort of.

As always when vegetables come up,I think back to Terry Schiavo. The tragedy for her is that she was not only unresponsive, she was so brain dead her physical brain actually atrophied down a third of its size. Her brain cavity was mostly cerebral fluid....

It's good, though, that we can determine which ones are truly unresponsive and which ones have some hope, however slender, of recovery.

If I ever end up in that situation, where I am "locked in," I'd request that someone at least play a variety of radio stations for me so I wouldn't go completely and utterly insane, even if they had no way of knowing whether I could hear it or not.