A woman (LR), unconscious for 20 years, spontaneously produces infrequent, isolated, words unrelated to any environmental context. Fluorodeoxy-glucose-positron emission tomography (FDG-PET) imaging coregistered with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) revealed a mean brain metabolism equivalent to deep anesthesia. Nevertheless, PET imaging demonstrated islands of modestly higher metabolism that included Broca's and Wernicke's areas. Functional brain imaging with magnetoencephalographic (MEG) imaging, a technique providing a temporal resolution of better than 1 millisecond, identified preserved dynamic patterns of spontaneous and evoked brain activity in response to sensory stimulation. Specifically, we examined spontaneous gamma-band activity (near 40 Hz) and its reset or modification during early auditory processing, a measure that correlates with human perception of sensory stimuli. Evidence of abnormal and incomplete gamma-band responses appeared in the left hemisphere only in response to auditory or somatosensory stimulation. MEG single dipole reconstructions localized to auditory cortex in the left hemisphere and overlapped with metabolically active regions identified by FDG-PET. The observation demonstrates that isolated neuronal groups may express well-defined fragments of activity in a severely damaged, unconscious brain. The motor fixed action pattern character of her expressed words supports the notion of brain modularity in word generation.