“It sounded like science fiction,” said noted neuroscientist Neuroscientist , about the first case of a phantom limb he came across, a syndrome he has since gone on to provide vital scientific insights into.
The phantom limb — an often debilitating condition, where a patient feels the presence of an amputated limb — first gripped him as a medical student, when he met a patient who felt that his amputated arm could move, said Prof. Ramachandran, who is Director of the Centre for Brain and Cognition, University of California, San Diego and author of Phantoms in the Brain . He was delivering a lecture on “What neurology can teach us about human uniqueness,” organised by Neurokrish, a neuropsychiatry centre here on Sunday.
Tracking the phantom limb to the prefrontal cortex that is “hungry for sensory inputs” from the missing limb, Prof. Ramachandran described how the very malleable and dynamic neural connections in the brain can recreate sensory maps and even perceive pain in the phantom limb.
But patients have begun finding answers in an unlikely device — a two-dollar mirror.
Visual stimuli
In the mirror-box technique he invented, the reflection of a real limb can help alleviate the pain of the phantom limb — and even eliminate the phantom altogether — indicating the importance of visual stimuli in the syndrome.
The technique, which targets the empathetic ‘mirror neurons,’ is now used to treat other neurological conditions such as painful strokes.
Among the many apparently inexplicable cases he has encountered is one that is in many ways the opposite of the phantom limb. Prof. Ramachandran narrated the story of a charismatic 60-year-old who lived with the desire to amputate his own arm.
Misfiring neurons
The condition, apotemnophilia, had the man see his arm as “an intrusion into his consciousness.” A condition that psychiatrists have earlier dismissed as a cry for attention, is in fact a physiological condition that comes from misfiring neurons in the brain’s superior parietal lobule, he said.
“The problems confronting us are quite extraordinary if you come to think of it. This little lump of jelly inside your skull, which weighs 1.5 kg, is able to contemplate the vastness of interstellar space, the meaning of infinity, falling in love and Shakespeare — how do you go about studying this extraordinary organ?”
Neurokrish founder E. S. Krishnamoorthy spoke about the success of multidisciplinary approaches in addressing chronic conditions such as epilepsy.
