Vegetative patients probably do not feel pain, but
imaging experiments indicate that minimally conscious patients do, even if they can not always react to it.
The researchers then used functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) to scan 21 of the participants» brains while they viewed pairs of short film clips showing classmates of varying status within this social network, telling them all they needed to do was
indicate whether the clips in each pair were the same or different, and that this task was unrelated to the first part of the
experiment.