This closes the article, by the way, and is, I think, revealing:

“The most consequential thing about this is that we have opened a door, we have found an objective voice for these patients, which tells us they have some cognitive ability in a way they cannot tell us themselves,” Dr. Hirsch said. The patients are, she added, “more human than we imagined in the past, and it is unconscionable not to aggressively pursue research efforts to evaluate them and develop therapeutic techniques.”

Dr. Joy Hirschis is IDed as director of the Functional MRI Research Center at Columbia University Medical Center and the study’s senior author. This medical doctor apparently counts herself among professionals who have considered the brain-damaged less human than you or I. That strikes me as an awfully dangerous place for the doctors to be.