Rom Houben has been trapped in a series of worst nightmares, including trying for 23 years to alert those around him that he was not in a coma. A new report suggests he’s not alone in his experience. In 1983, Belgian engineering student and martial arts enthusiast Houben, then 20, was in a car accident that was thought to have left him in a vegetative state. Doctors relied on the widely-used Glasgow Coma Scale , assessing his eyes, verbal, and motor responses. What they failed to notice was that Houben was actually conscious—but completely paralyzed. “I screamed, but there was no one to hear,” he says in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel . Three years ago, neurologist Steven Laureys used modern scanning techniques to discover that Houben’s cerebral cortex was, in fact, functioning. (The doctor has only just now made Houben’s story public.) Houben, who communicates via a computer with a special keyboard activated with the slightest movement of his right hand, is now 46.

Original Source of Brain Scan Finds Man Was Not in a Coma—23 Years Later [Neuroscience]