Adrian M. Owen, OBE, FRS
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comadork.bsky.social
Adrian M. Owen, OBE, FRS
@comadork.bsky.social

British/Canadian Neuroscientist. Two times cancer survivor. Bucket list ticker. Proud atheist. Author of Sunday Times Best-seller ‘Into The Gray Zone'.

Adrian Mark Owen is a British and Canadian neuroscientist and best-selling author. He is best known for his 2006 discovery, published in the journal Science, showing that some patients thought to be in a vegetative state are in fact fully aware and able to communicate with the outside world using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In the 2019 New Year Honours List, Owen was made an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to scientific research. Owen was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2024. .. more

Neuroscience 69%
Public Health 15%

I know it's a bit early, but this stocking filler will be coming to a good bookstore near you on August 4th, 2026 😀

Many thanks for all the kind words about my post yesterday. The issue has now been resolved and the lab is back up and running. I will not be providing any more details.

Reposted by Adrian M. Owen

Reposted by Pam Jarvis

One in four comatose (behaviourally non-responsive) patients in the ICU following a serious brain injury show us they are aware using fNIRS - published today. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Reposted by Adrian M. Owen

Why treadmills soothe our minds and joysticks sharpen our wits: fab to see the peer-reviewed results of our online mass experiment for the Manchester Science Festival with @comadork.bsky.social and his team from @westernu.ca in @plosone.org! blog.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/why-treadmil...
Why treadmills soothe our minds and joysticks sharpen our wits | Science and Industry Museum
Detailed findings of a pioneering 'brain and body' study developed for the Manchester Science Festival have just been published, reports Science Director, and study co-author, Roger Highfield.
blog.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk

It will be 20 years next year, yet our 2006 article continues to be the paper that keeps on giving. What a wild ride it’s been! www.nature.com/articles/d41...
The quest to detect consciousness — in all its possible forms
Insights from human brains might inform how scientists search for awareness in other animals and AI.
www.nature.com

Very proud of this one. If you want a complete primer on the history of functional neuroimaging in disorders of consciousness, then this is for you. With @karnig-kazazian.bsky.social and Martin Monti. owenlab.org/uploads/pdfF...
owenlab.org

Ah yes, the paper that keeps on giving! We’re ramping up for some special updates on the 20th anniversary in 2026.

My new book, provisionally titled “Thinking On Your Feet” will be published soon by #norton. But maybe I should retitling it “The Rise and Fall of the American Frontal Lobe”? Everyone seems to have stopped thinking for themselves. Did some cosmic event turn off an entire nation’s frontal lobes?

Moi.

It took them a while to catch on, but they’re finally waking up. If you wait to be told what to do, it will be too late to do anything about it. apple.news/AvPEO57t0TSS...
Canadian university teachers warned against travelling to the United States — The Canadian Press
The association that represents academic staff at Canadian universities is wa
apple.news
Wow, we are now being officially advised against travel to the USA by the Canadian Association of University Teachers. I never thought I'd see the day. ☹️ #AcademicChatter

One boss passes the baton to another. Incredible performances all round. I’ve seem them both many times and this shows they are more than the sum
of their parts www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cma_...
The Killers & Bruce Springsteen: Encore At The Garden
YouTube video by TheKillersMusic
www.youtube.com

Then he’ll sort Alzheimer’s disease by Christmas, cancer early in the new year, and eradicate heart disease by the summer. It’s shocking that thousands of scientists have spent decades failing to solve problems that one man with no relevant qualifications is going to fix in less than a year.

Look out for our forthcoming paper on the relationship between exercise and cognition. Provisional title: Running Man….

It’s part of a special issue in honour of my good friend and former colleague John Duncan (Cambridge). We’re very proud of this work. It still feels extraordinary to me that you can decode precise memories from people’s brain activity alone.

In my ongoing quest to publish as many academic papers with Arnold Schwazenegger movies as part of the title, I give you…..Total Recall….out today and free to read www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Total recall: Detecting autobiographical memory retrieval in the absence of behaviour
Functional neuroimaging has fundamentally changed our understanding of disorders of consciousness (DoC). While many DoC patients exhibit minimal to no…
www.sciencedirect.com

Ditto.

Post you from a different era. One side done. 1980.

*BREAKING* World’s largest baby throws second tantrum in as many days…

Reposted by Adrian M. Owen

New version of "the letter" in Nature Neuroscience. Like many others in the field, I signed because I believe that IIT threatens to deligitimize the scientific study of consciousness: www.nature.com/articles/s41....
What makes a theory of consciousness unscientific? - Nature Neuroscience
Theories of consciousness have a long and controversial history. One well-known proposal — integrated information theory — has recently been labeled as ‘pseudoscience’, which has caused a heated open ...
www.nature.com