The Great Experiment
Numerous competing scientific theories attempt to describe consciousness. In an unprecedented collaboration, trials are now taking place on hundreds of subjects worldwide to put two of the leading approaches to the test.
About 20 years ago, the then psychology student Lucia Melloni received tragic news. Her mother informed her that her sister's partner had been in a serious accident and was now in the hospital. Diagnosis: brain dead. The family rushed to his house for one last goodbye before the life support machines were turned off. "It was really scary," Melloni recalls."There lay a man who was breathing and radiating warmth. When I spoke to him, he moved his legs." The doctors had told the visitors that something like this could happen because the basic reflexes are present even in the brain-dead patient. But how can you be sure that someone's consciousness is gone forever?
After all, we lose and regain consciousness every day when we fall asleep – just like when we faint or are given an anesthetic before an operation. As an outsider, how can one judge whether someone will awaken or remain in the unconscious state forever? Melloni has devoted himself to this question since the tragic event. She did her doctorate in neuroscience and dedicated her subsequent research career, which has meanwhile led her to the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt am Main, to the millennia-old problem of the human mind …
