Terry Wallis (born 7 April 1964) is an American man living in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas who on June 11, 2003 regained awareness after spending almost 20 years in a minimally conscious state.
Following a 1984 automobile accident, in which one of his friends died, he, then aged 20, fell into a coma that later stabilized into a minimally conscious state.
In 2003 he awakened from his minimal conscious state and began to talk, asking one of the staff in the nursing home who the woman in his room was. She told him that it was his mother. He believed that he was still 20 and that it was still 1984. His muscles remained weak as his family could not afford physiotherapy, but he gradually recovered over a three day "awakening period" in which he regained the ability to control some parts of his body and to speak to others. However, he remains disabled from injuries suffered during the original accident, including the motor disorder dysarthria.
Wallis was the subject of the BodyShock special for 2005 "The Man Who Slept For 19 Years" made for Channel 4 in the UK.[1] It shows his mother and daughter encouraging him to talk to neurologists to try to find out how Wallis had regained speech after such a long time. The program featured several well known doctors, including Dr. Caroline McCagg, the medical director of the JFK Center for head injury in New Jersey, Dr. Joe Giacino, a neuropsychologist who said Terry's brain retained lots of information from before 1984 but hardly any after 1984 because Wallis lost the ability to store new memories and was essentially amnestic, and Dr. Martin Gizzi, a neurologist who showed that, owing to damage to the frontal lobes, he could not process experiences into memories. Also featured in the program was the neuropsychologist professor Roger Llewellyn Wood.
Using new technology, brain scans were done on Wallis by Nicholas Schiff of Weill Cornell Medical College.[2] The hypothesis built from the imaging studies is that Wallis's brain reconnected neurons which remained intact and formed new connections to circumvent damaged areas.