Phantoms in the Brain.Pdf
PHANTOMS IN THE BRAIN Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind V.S. Ramachandran, M.D., Ph.D., and Sandra Blakeslee Copyright © 1998 ISBN 0688152473 To my mother, Meenakshi To my father, Subramanian To my brother, Ravi To Diane, Mani and Jayakrishna To all my former teachers in India and England 1 To Saraswathy, the goddess of learning, music and wisdom Foreword The great neurologists and psychiatrists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were masters of description, and some of their case histories provided an almost novelistic richness of detail. Silas Weir Mitchell—who was a novelist as well as a neurologist—provided unforgettable descriptions of the phantom limbs (or "sensory ghosts," as he first called them) in soldiers who had been injured on the battlefields of the Civil War. Joseph Babinski, the great French neurologist, described an even more extraordinary syndrome—anosognosia, the inability to perceive that one side of one's own body is paralyzed and the often−bizarre attribution of the paralyzed side to another person. (Such a patient might say of his or her own left side, "It's my brother's" or "It's yours.") Dr. V.S. Ramachandran, one of the most interesting neuroscientists of our time, has done seminal work on the nature and treatment of phantom limbs—those obdurate and sometimes tormenting ghosts of arms and legs lost years or decades before but not forgotten by the brain. A phantom may at first feel like a normal limb, a part of the normal body image; but, cut off from normal sensation or action, it may assume a pathological character, becoming intrusive, "paralyzed," deformed, or excruciatingly painful—phantom fingers may dig into a phantom palm with an unspeakable, unstoppable intensity.
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