Question 1

I love this video! Very informative! I do have a question, however. I remember reading somewhere that a mirror and a technique could help with phantom limb pains, but have they actually found a full cure for it? I love learning about these kinds of things, with things we can do help people with science!
-G.J.

Accepted Answer

Hi G.J.
The technique you read about it called Mirror Therapy or Mirror Box Therapy.  It was first developed by V.S. Ramachandran.

Question 2

Can a person experience pain in another part of the body after a limb is amputated?

Accepted Answer

Sorry for the late answer Gail, but interesting question! I'm really not sure, to be honest, so I did some quick research. According to WebMD and Mayo Clinic, the symptoms seem to be restricted to the amputated parts only. However, we'd need to ask a real amputee to see what they really experience.

Question 3

After all that, what is a is a phantom limb?

Accepted Answer

It's when you have an amputated arm or leg, but you still seem to feel pain or other sensations in the area where it used to be.

Question 4

At 5:30, Jackson talks about the phantom limb relationship between the arm & hand and the face.  Somatotopic organization implies that we should be able to predict to which neurons the "deprived" neurons will connect.  So are we able to forecast which sensory inputs will cause phantom limb sensations based on the loss of different limbs?

Accepted Answer

Spot on thinking, JAYNESS the Great (love the username by the way)! I believe Ramachandran actually used this fact to demonstrate his theory. I'll quote directly from Bear, Connors and Paradiso's "Exploring the Brain" textbook which contains a page written by Ramachandran himself: "One of the first experiments I did was on a patient who had a phantom left arm following amputation. Inspired by work on monkeys, I simply touched various parts of his body and face with a cotton swab. Imagine my astonishment when I touched the left cheek and he said he felt the touch in his phantom hand!... We then did brain imaging on the same patient and found that touching the face does indeed activate the hand cortex, and this was the first demonstration of such large-scale reorganisation of sensory maps in the adult human cortex." So yes, it is indeed possible to predict the areas that, when stimulated, will lead to phantom sensations precisely owing to the concept of somatotopy. However, sometimes the reorganisation and plasticity might not be as predictable.

Question 5

Why is it called Phantomb limb why not just sprained, immobilized or froze

Accepted Answer

Because the Limb isn't connected to the body but the brain still makes it feel pain

Question 6

Another question, at around 5 minutes the narrator said that Bob's brain had rewired itself, could the same thing happen to other animals other than humans?

Accepted Answer

That would probably depend on the animal and how like a human's or monkey's brain it was.

Course: Breakthrough Junior Challenge > Unit 1

Phantom limbs

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