Comatose Belgian who was in fact awake all the time was in fact comatose

[Andail]

Anyone remembers this story some months ago? A man who had been believed to be in coma for 23 years somehow woke up and could communicate with the help of caregivers, and revealed what a nightmare he'd gone through, with noone knowing about his awake state.

Even back then, some people were skeptic.

Now it has recently been debunked properly, with involved people admitting the fallacy of the assisted communication project, and describing the idiomotoric phenomenon.

The scary thing isn't just that so many people fell for the hoax, but how detailed Houben's alleged accounts were. Scary.

Wikipedia already has a good coverage of the story.

[Khris]

I personally think it's way scarier that so many people and more or less all the mass media fell for this obviously bogus "facilitated communication" crap.

[MrColossal]

What I don't understand about this is how simple it is to debunk. Get someone who does not speak the same language as the comatose person that is supposedly communicating and have them facilitate. If the results are the comatose person speaks a new language all of the sudden... Well...

I'm glad the correct version of the story is making its way around now but man, so many months have passed. What took so long?

[GarageGothic]

Well, the really scary part to me seems to be that the guy does in fact have locked-in syndrome - the hoax was only the facilitated communication bit, as far as I could tell. So now he's not only aware but unable to communicate but also suffered the indignity of being the tool of someone scamming his family and putting words in his mouth.

[Snarky]

It doesn't seem to be clear that this was a hoax or a scam, in other words that the "communication facilitator" was acting in bad faith rather than simply deluding herself. Very poor job by the doctors for not testing it with a proper protocol right away, in any case.

[monkey0506]

I hadn't heard of this story before now, but I watched the news video..I'm somewhat taken aback that the "facilitator" was just some woman moving his hand and typing on the keyboard.

I understand some people think I'm crazy/delusional for my religious beliefs, but this type of thing just screams out to me..is she supposed to be "channeling" his brainwaves or something? Is she some type of "psychic"? What I see in that video is very clearly a woman directing his hand to type whatever she feels would make the best story, nothing more.

[Calin Leafshade]

she is supposed to feel the tiny amount of pressure his arm makes as he tries to move it. Its not psychic powers. It was NEVER supposed to be psychic powers.

This story actually highlights the strength of science. Its self-correcting.

Someone fucked up, someone else caught the error, the error was corrected.

if only ALL areas of life were like that...

Spoiler

creationists are STILL crazy

[close]

[Khris]

It doesn't seem to be clear that this was a hoax or a scam, in other words that the "communication facilitator" was acting in bad faith rather than simply deluding herself.

The sad thing is that this seems to be rather common. At a "New Age" convention a guy tested dowsers (five buckets, one had a bottle with water beneath it, the others had bottles filled with sand). The results were predictable, the tested dowsers were able to "find" the water with a likeliness exactly equal to chance (20%).
The amazing thing is however that most of the dowsers were devastated by the results, displaying genuine shock that they didn't have supernatural powers.

[monkey0506]

Of course. How silly of me to not realize that every person who ever falls into a coma-esque state would instantaneously become fluent in some type of Morse code.

[Khris]

He was typing on a touchscreen keyboard. Very fast and sometimes without "looking at it", though.