Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Phantom Limbs
The idea that if your arm gets chopped off and you loose it forever your mind will unconcousily believe that your arm is actually there. The part that surprises me is that the infants that are born without limbs also get the feeling that they have pain in a limb that they never had. Im wondering if this is becuase of there soul and everyones soul has four appendages seeing as everyone is equal in gods eye or that there is a gene that says im a human and im supposed to have two arms and two legs
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
8 comments:
I'm kind of confused how we know the infant's feeling. I have a son who is 18 month. However, it's really hard to know what he feels.(except hungry, happy, etc)
I agree with Jun. I believe the only people who can really experience the "phantom limb" feeling are those who have had the limb in the first place. Otherwise, how would you know you were feeling pain in said limb unless it had previously existed for you to have already known that pain.
Yeah, that is odd. I agree with both Jesse and Jun. How is it possible to feel a limb that you were never born with? It's kind of like saying "I can see, even though I have no eyes". If the limb existed there before, and was amputated, then the ghost limb theory could be possible. You should'nt be able to experience something that was never there. The body works in so many odd ways.
Our brains are like big jumbles of complex roadways where signals go back and forth, so it has to have it's own map to send messages to the right places. From the womb are brains are mapped out so it's not obsurd that a baby born without a leg should still have an address for that leg on file in the brain.
This site helps to understand: http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/en/pain/microsite/medicine2.html
I agree with Jasmine, I think its possible because even if someone is born without limbs that doesn't mean that the part of their brain that would control the basic motor functions of those nonexistant limbs would not exist as well.
Jasmine, did you post this? If not, we need to get the person a user ID.
Perhaps whoever posted this would like to email the author (Jonathan Cole) and ask him where he got the data on infants/children and phantom limb. It's not clear from his reference list...
Report back to us! rw
Zach posted it.
Phantom limb is just a play on the body tricking the brain of thinking the body part is thier. It's a bit clever if one thinks about it.
Post a Comment