Ramachandran's The Perception Of Phantom Limbs

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Recommended: Discoveries in the scientific revolution

In today’s scientific world, research studies are in constant process leading to new discoveries. Every scientific discovery is rooted off a simple foundation that is then elaborated through years of research by various professionals. Therefore, it is important to understand where a specific finding originated from and how it evolved over the years – acknowledging the story behind the story. In such manner, highlighting one of the well known neuroscience research is the study on the reorganization of an adult brain. This topic has been monitored for several centuries by various scientists. In particular, a neuroscientist named Vilayanur Subramanian Ramachandran is known for his breakthrough contribution on the study of the adult brain and its …show more content…

Ramachandran’s work on the reorganization of the brain is mainly focused on the theory of the interdependency between the mind and the body(Ramachandran, 1998). He focused on this particular aspect through the study of phantom limbs- painful conditions in the limb after an amputation. With the help of previous findings such as the use of MEG, Ramachandran states that the adult brain consists of organized somatosensory maps that is affiliated with the senses and stores the memories into place. (Ramachandran, 1993). Therefore, when an individual’s arm or leg is amputated, the memories and the functionalities of the body part still remains in place. In scientific terms, the sensory map of the body is known to exist in the somatosensory cortex where the reorganization takes place. (Ramachandran, 1998). Through his detailed research on the phantom limbs, Ramachandran introduced the notion of “learned paralysis” where once the body part is amputated the brain learns that the body part is not functional anymore (Ramachandran, 1998). Ramachandran argued that if the brain is capable of learning such notion, then there must be a way for it to unlearn and reorganize. He justified this specific theory through his mirror box experiment where the patient’s normal hand is reflected where the amputee hand is

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