Assessing Ariel Sharon
April 16, 2013
The Jewish Journal — A team of brain scientists recently tested former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon using a functional MRI machine to assess his brain responses at BGU’s Brain Imaging Research Center at Soroka University Medical Center in Beer-Sheva.
The team consisted of Prof. Alon Friedman, Drs. Galia Avidan and Tzvi Ganel of BGU’s Zlotowski Center for Neuroscience, Erez Freud, Ph.D. student in BGU’s Department of Psychology, Dr. Ilan Shelef, head of Medical Imaging at Soroka University Medical Center, and Prof. Martin Monti, from the Departments of Psychology and Neurosurgery at UCLA.
Prof. Monti developed the testing methods and worked closely with the researchers from BGU in the months leading up to the testing.
In early 2006, then prime minister Sharon suffered a massive stroke and had since been presumed to be in a vegetative state.
However, these new MRI tests indicated significant brain activity. Sharon’s brain showed activation each time he was instructed, for example, to conjure images of his home and of playing tennis (an activity he once enjoyed).
Sharon’s brain reaction was also monitored when he was shown photographs of himself during his military career and when the recorded voice of his son Gilad was played.
Those activations, illustrated dramatically on a computer monitor when a spark appeared in images of the relevant portions of the brain, indicated that Sharon understood and executed each instruction, and together mean that he can be classified as “minimally conscious.”
Purchased with contributions from Americans for Ben-Gurion University, the state-of-the-art MRI machine used in the testing is the most powerful medical imaging machine in Israel.
Read more on The Jewish Journal website >>
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