Discuss Vilayanur Ramachandran's work with phantom pain and his success with tricking the brain of an amputee with a simple mirror. How are his techniques being used today?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answer: A good answer will include the following key points.
• Vilayanur Ramachandran, the neurologist who first proposed this theory, has developed an extraordinarily simple but effective treatment for phantom-limb pain.
• Ramachandran wondered whether he could devise an illusion to trick the brain of an amputee with phantom arm pain into perceiving the missing limb as moving and pain-free.
• He placed a simple mirror upright and perpendicular to the sufferer's body, such that the amputee's intact limb was reflected in the mirror on both sides of the person's body.
• From the amputee's perspective, the result was an illusion of two functioning arms. The amputee was then instructed to move both arms in synchrony while looking into the mirror.
• With this technique, which has now been used with many people, the brain is fooled into thinking its owner has two healthy arms, resynchronizes the signals—and phantom pain vanishes.
• Neurologists have been testing the method with Iraq veterans, and are finding it to be more successful than control therapies in which patients simply visualize having two intact limbs.