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A person is in post vegetative state when they are brain dead but their body maintains vegetative functions because the brain stem is intact. A person in PVS breathes on his own, is able to process nutrients, circulate blood, even open eyes, make sounds, and appear to be consciously there but theoretically they are not, and all these outputs are just reflexes.

Connecting what we talked about in class, the I-box of a person in PVS is not active, but everything else is functional. Without this box their body is just a big robot, feeding off nutrients. Is this i-box the mind? Well we can study people in PVS and find that PVS occurs after coma, or after seroius brain damage. I think this is another exmaple of how brain = behavior. Brain damage causes loss of the I-function which is extremely importnat for our existence.

Where is this i-box in our dreams? Like we said in class, what is important is not activity but patterns of activity of the same neurons for different functions. For dreams, this i-box probably consists of the same neurons we use to makee sense of the outside world but they are probably activated in different patterns.