Astonishing stories from the borderlands between life and death. They say you're in a persistent vegetative state. They say you have no more awareness than a head of broccoli. They say you don't understand speech or have memories, that you don't have emotions, and that you feel neither pleasure nor pain. They're wrong.You hear everything they say. And you experience panic, fear and sadness at their words.Dr Adrian Owen's astonishing research into the most damaged brains has uncovered a population of people living in this 'Grey Zone' - intact minds trapped deep inside broken bodies and brains.

And he has discovered a way to communicate with them.This changes everything. It changes the way we think about what it means to be alive, and what makes a person a person. And, when death ceases to be a defined event, or a sudden ending, we are forced to reconsider terms such as 'brain death'. The ethical and moral dilemmas are staggering. As Dr Owen and his team take the first tentative steps into the Grey Zone, and hold the first ever conversations with the people dwelling there, this population of the not quite living and the not quite gone is poised on the brink of a brave new world. Exploring it through case studies and cutting edge research, this book is the beginnings of a map to what we might find there.