Researchers have found that patients who appear to be unconscious have surprisingly complicated brain activity. Neurologist Nicholas Schiff, researcher at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, is studying patients who spend months or years apparently unaware of the outside world and unable to communicate. Schiff is using new brain-imaging techniques and hopes to understand more about the complex nature of consciousness. He wants to find ways to help patients who suffer severe unconsciousness disorders. After examining a patient who had come out of a coma after 20 years, Schiff began to use a new method that created detailed maps of brain nerve fibers. His examinations provided surprising results, seeming to show that the patient's brain had partially healed. Improvements in medical technologies have kept more people alive after brain injuries, but many have been left impaired and in apparently permanent states of unconsciousness. Recent studies by Schiff and others show that at least some of the seemingly unaware patients have very high levels of brain activity. Schiff is working to connect the structural changes or functional changes that allow some long-term coma patients to recover. They hope, eventually, to devise treatments that can replicate those changes in other patients. At the same time, their research is opening up the hidden world of brain activity.