From Althea Pearson
David Robson describes research into mind-body connections, including Matthew Botvinick’s discovery that a person can be tricked into believing a false hand is their own – the “rubber-hand illusion” (15 October, p 34).
He wonders about important clinical applications: “A version of the rubber-hand illusion might help the brain to accept a prosthetic limb.” My understanding is that a similar application exists. Conditions including phantom-limb pain have been successfully treated using a “virtual reality box”, more commonly known as a mirror box, invented by neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran.
Describing his early results, Ramachandran observed that amputees sensed movement in the phantom limb, even though it was just a reflected image (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.1996.0058).
He and his co-author commented that “there must be a great deal of back and forth interaction between vision and touch, so that the strictly modular, hierarchical model of the brain that is in vogue needs to be replaced with a more dynamic, interactive model”.
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Somerton, Somerset, UK
