Recent studies providing evidence for preserved awareness in some behaviorally unresponsive patients stress the need to improve diagnosis in patients with disorders of consciousness - and stress the possible dissociation between responsiveness and preserved consciousness. Because active paradigms can only bring information in the few cases where they return positive, a major effort is needed to setup ancillary markers evaluating the brain's ability to generate consciousness without requiring the patients' collaboration - in this context, research on neural correlates of consciousness and coma science progress hand in hand.