Christian Jarrett, writing for the British Psychological Society:

V.S. Ramachandran and his colleague Paul McGeoch have reported a phantom limb case that illustrates how aspects of the body map are apparently hard-wired. The case is a 57-year-old woman (known as R.N.) who was born with a deformed right hand consisting of only three fingers and a rudimentary thumb. After a car crash at age 18, R.N.’s deformed hand was amputated, which gave rise to feelings of a phantom hand. Curiously, R.N. experienced her phantom hand as having a full complement of five fingers, albeit that some of the digits were foreshortened. In other words, she was experiencing the sensation of having fingers that she’d never physically possessed.

Incredible, creepy, incredible and fascinating.

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Jeff Cormier

Dad, husband, dog lover, law, write at DigitalDeconstruction.com and other online destinations, forever immature. It's the me that I let you know.

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