Asleep, Hibernation, Coma, or Vegetative State?

As I was shutting down my laptop a few minutes ago I noticed that Bill Gates asked me if I wanted it to shut down, hibernate, or go to sleep. My first thought was, "I clicked on 'turn off computer', what do you THINK I want it to do?" My second thought was, "What is the difference between hibernating and sleeping?"

My friends with the Colorado cabin that my family uses at Christmas think there is a difference, at least with bears. One night last December my grandkids decided to go outside into the woods, with snow up to their knees, to play "Flashlight Tag." I couldn't think of a reason for them not to, except that sitting inside in front of a warm fire seemed smarter to me, but I texted the cabin owner and asked him what he thought. He texted back, "Since it is winter, the bears are hibernating, so it should be okay." (They have a bear problem during the summer. One tore off the door and broke into their shed, hauled out the freezer, forced it open and ate the entire contents last summer!)

The question about the difference between sleeping and hibernating made me remember an article I read a few weeks ago about the debate on whether or not people in a vegetative state can communicate. Some researchers have recently claimed they can. When you ask some people in a vegetative state to visualize a face and then ask them to visualize a house, different areas of their brain fire, as shown by a fMRI. This, they say is an indication that "someone is in there and trying to communicate." Other neuroscientists have argued that cognition is not communication.

Here was the question I had as I was reading the article, "What is the difference between a coma and a vegetative state?"

Merck.com says: "A coma is unresponsiveness from which the patient cannot be aroused... The vegetative state is a chronic condition that preserves the ability to maintain [Blood Pressure], respiration, and cardiac function, but not cognitive function... The patient has no awareness of self and interacts with the environment only via reflexes."

The authors of the original article I was reading said that the easiest way to determine the difference was that people in a coma have their eyes closed, while people in a vegetative state have their eyes open.

Now that I have kept my computer on so that I could post this blog, I am going to tell it to "turn off" because I feel an afternoon "sleep" coming on. I will not be hibernating, in a coma, or in a vegetative state, so please be quiet when you walk past my big green LazyBoy.