Brain (1998), 121, 1603–1630 INVITED REVIEW The perception of phantom limbs The D. O. Hebb lecture V. S. Ramachandran and William Hirstein Center for Brain and Cognition, 0109, University of Correspondence to: V. S. Ramachandran, Center for Brain California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA and Cognition, 0109, University of California, San Diego, 1610, LaJolla, CA 92093, USA. E-mail:
[email protected] Summary Almost everyone who has a limb amputated will humans, so that it is now possible to track perceptual experience a phantom limb—the vivid impression that changes and changes in cortical topography in individual the limb is not only still present, but in some cases, patients. We suggest, therefore, that these patients provide painful. There is now a wealth of empirical evidence a valuable opportunity not only for exploring neural demonstrating changes in cortical topography in primates plasticity in the adult human brain but also for following deafferentation or amputation, and this review understanding the relationship between the activity of will attempt to relate these in a systematic way to the sensory neurons and conscious experience. We conclude clinical phenomenology of phantom limbs. With the with a theory of phantom limbs, some striking advent of non-invasive imaging techniques such as MEG demonstrations of phantoms induced in normal subjects, (magnetoencephalogram) and functional MRI, topo- and some remarks about the relevance of these phenomena graphical reorganization can also be demonstrated in to the question of