When the captain of a boat adjusts his course in response to commands from your Designated Mate, he may not know where he is taking you.
He reviewed dozens of videos recorded by Jahi's relatives of the girl moving in response to commands, and concluded that she was not in fact brain dead.
In response to commands, the patient's brain flared with activity, lighting the same language and movement-planning regions that are active when healthy people hear the commands.
More important, they presented video evidence purporting to show that, on at least two occasions, Jahi had moved her limbs in response to commands.
But in recent months at a clinic in Liège, Belgium, the patient, now 29, showed traces of brain activity in response to commands from doctors.
In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Zoellick said that he did not mean to suggest that China was deliberately trying to funnel oil from world markets, but rather that its vast energy bureaucracy was racing along that path in response to commands to keep the economy growing.
A completely autonomous robot could, of course, pick up an object, but it would require a lot of intelligence for it to determine, in response to commands or some general set of objectives, which object it should look for in the first place.
In recent years, brain scientists have found numerous problems with the standard bedside test for assessing conscious awareness: checking whether a person's eyes can track moving objects, and carefully looking for any signs — finger twitches, blinks — in response to commands or questions.
The Turtle was originally a robotic creature that traveled around on the floor in response to commands from a computer to move forward and back, and to turn to the right or left.
Four patients (17%) clinically diagnosed as vegetative could modulate their brain activity in response to commands, thereby demonstrating covert awareness.
