Adrian Owen

In October 2019 Owen was the guest for the BBC Radio 4 programme The Life Scientific.

In June 2017, Owen published 'Into The Gray Zone: A Neuroscientist Explores the Border Between Life and Death' a popular science book that told the story of his 20-year quest to show that some patients thought to be in a vegetative state were in fact entirely aware, but incapable of indicating their awareness to the outside world. The book became a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic and received rave reviews from Nature ("A riveting read"), The Guardian ("Beautiful and moving"), The Times ("... the shock almost made me drop my book"), The New York Times ("Owen reprises his cases with enthusiasm and empathy"), The Daily Mail ("Thought-provoking and deeply moving"), the New Statesman (“"A fascinating book, written with evangelical fervor…gripping and moving"), The New Yorker ("Riveting and strangely uplifting"), The Globe and Mail ("The model of how pop science involving sensational subjects should done"), the Winnipeg Free Press ("prepare to be fascinated, astonished, and, at times, moved to tears"), The Mail on Sunday ("fascinating memoir…The Gray Zone reads like a thriller"), and many others. The book made Sunday Times 'Book of The Year', and The Times 'Book of The Week', it was listed on The New Yorker list 'What We're Reading This Summer' and received 4.8 out of 5 stars on Amazon. The book has been translated into multiple languages, including Italian, French, Russian, German, Taiwanese, Japanese, Czech and Polish.

In November 2011, Owen led a study that was published in a weekly peer-reviewed medical journal, The Lancet. The Researchers found a method for assessing whether or not some patients who appear to be vegetative, are in fact, conscious and are just not able to respond. This new method is using electroencephalography (EEG), which is not only less expensive than MRI, but is also portable and can be taken right to the patients bedside for testing.

In 2010, Owen was awarded a $10M Canada Excellence Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience and Imaging at The University of Western Ontario (UWO) and moved most of his research team to Canada in order to take up this position in January 2011.

In April 2010, Owen and his team published the largest ever public test of computer-based brain training in the journal Nature. The study, conducted in conjunction with the BBC, showed that practice on brain training games does not transfer to other mental skills. More than 11,000 adults followed a six-week training regime, completing computer-based tasks on the BBC's website designed to improve reasoning, memory, planning, visuospatial skills and attention. Details of the results were revealed on BBC1 in Can You Train Your Brain?, a Bang Goes the Theory special and published on the same day in Nature.

In 2009, Owen launched Cambridge Brain Sciences, a free web-based platform for members of the public and the wider scientific community to assess their cognitive function using scientifically proven tests of memory, attention, reasoning and planning. To date, the tests on the site have been taken more than 8 million times by people worldwide.

His 2006 paper in the journal Science demonstrated for the first time that functional neuroimaging could be used to detect awareness in patients who are incapable of generating any recognised behavioural response and appear to be in a vegetative state. This landmark discovery has had implications for clinical care, diagnosis, medical ethics and medical/legal decision-making (relating to the prolongation, or otherwise, of life after severe brain injury). In a follow up paper in 2010 in The New England Journal of Medicine, Owen and his team used a similar method to allow a man believed to be in a vegetative state for more than 5 years to answer 'yes' and 'no' questions with responses that were generated solely by changing his brain activity using fMRI.

His post-doctoral research on working memory with Michael Petrides, (PNAS, Cerebral Cortex, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Brain and others) was instrumental in refuting the then prevailing view of lateral frontal-lobe organisation advanced by Patricia Goldman-Rakic and others, and is still widely cited in that context. His 1996 paper on the organisation of working memory processes within the human frontal lobe continues to be one of the most highly cited articles ever to appear in the scientific journal Cerebral Cortex.

In 1992, Owen began his post-doctoral research in the Cognitive Neuroscience Unit at the Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, working with Michael Petrides and Brenda Milner. He was awarded The Pinsent Darwin Scholarship by the University of Cambridge in 1996 and returned to the UK to work at the newly opened Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre, Cambridge. In 1997 he moved to the Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (CBU), Cambridge (formally the Applied Psychology Unit) to set up the neuroimaging programme there and to pursue his research in cognitive neuroscience. He was awarded MRC tenure in 2000 and made Assistant Director of the MRC CBU in 2005, with overall responsibility for the onsite imaging facilities (3T Siemens Tim Trio MRI and 306-channel Elekta-Neuromag MEG systems).

Adrian Mark Owen OBE (born 17 May 1966) is a British neuroscientist and best-selling author. He is best known for his 2006 discovery, published in the journal Science, showing that some patients thought to be in a persistent vegetative state are in fact fully aware and (shown subsequently) able to communicate with the outside world using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In the 2019 New Year Honours List, Owen was made an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to scientific research.

Adrian Owen was born 17 May 1966 in Gravesend, England, and educated at Gravesend Grammar School, graduating in the same final year class as actor Paul Ritter. His first degree was in Psychology from University College London 1985–1988. As a student he shared accommodation with Psychologist and best-selling author Richard Wiseman. Owen completed his PhD at the Institute of Psychiatry, London (now part of King's College London) between 1988 and 1992.