Well, true, but the location must have been pretty, um, invigorating on it's own? :D But, to be completely naked?? Ha, I'd worry about sunburn and my clothes flying over the balcony. :blush:

Depends on two slightly different motives:

1. The risk of getting caught is a thrill.
2. The fact of being seen is a thrill.

To the extent that I've engaged in inappropriate public behavior in the past (sadly the thought process has changed from "if I get arrested for this I'd be so embarrassed!" to "if I get arrested for this I'd probably get fired!" so I'd never do now what I did years ago) it was more the former than the latter. But these people seem to be squarely in the latter camp.

Or perhaps it is just the best cuckoo clock ever.

I have always worried about who would see us so I guess I'm not an exhibitionist. I don't worry about being seen doing a lot of other things but that, well....

Arrested? Crap! Never considered that.

Places are cool but I don't care to be seen. That's all I'm gonna say about that.

It is a wasted day here at work so I've been poking around on this and everything I've seen convinces me it is facilitated communication and therefore complete bunk.

They may have found other evidence of consciousness (though the details on that seem to be unknown) but these conversations he's had aren't. First step is to get a faciliator who doesn't speak Flemish and see how good the results are. Then ask him questions while his facilitator is out of the room.

Then fire the doctors who fell for this and feel really bad for the family desperately grasping at straws and taken in by a con.

They claim they started with yes/no questions that he answered (presumably unassisted) using taps with his foot. I wonder how illegitimate even that much was.

What they didn't mention in the article is that this particular clocktower is directly opposite Sydney University.

...those crazy Uni Students !!!

Here's a headline you don't see everyday!

http://www.vcstar.com/news/2009/nov/...y-motorist-in/

Now they're going after each other!!!!

Hmmm - the NPR interview with the MD made it sound like they conducted tests to rule out facilitated communication.

I'd be interested in hearing that, if you recall which program it was. [ETA: Was it the interview mentioned in this blog post over at NeuroLogica? BTW, that post also prefectly sums up the position of I've reached: he may be conscious but he probably isn't communicating through this method]

But all the videos I've found so far show his facilitator, his typing is near perfect and fast (odd for a person with spastic motor control) and doesn't seem get worse when he head is turned away from the screen (try typing with one finger while your eyes are closed with no tactile feedback). ETA: See this video linked from the blog post I added above where he is pretty clearly communicating and typing with his eyes close. The following is a sentence I'll type with one finger, eyes closed, and with the benefit of tactile feedback from the keyboard rather than a flat computer screen:

tjis us jaxilitated ci,,unication

Wow, better than I expected. But I can touch type at around 100 words a minute so have the keyboard visually in my head and could always find the f and j keys because of the bumps on them. He is not resetting his position after each letter, just jumping perfectly from letter to letter (and much faster than I just did, though he'd be well praticed by now).

I'd be happy to be wrong (and I'm still agnostic on whether they found other evidence of consciousness) so would be very interested in how they defended against influence from the facilitator but do remember that similar claims were made for autistic facilitators years ago (and if the trend from those are mirrored here, eventually the speaker will make claims of sexual abuse against caregivers).

This is what I originally heard

which implied to me it was validated. non-the-less, the thought of being conscious and unable to communicate is the real wtf for me in this story, as I think I'd rather just be vegitative