CHENNAI: A man walked into neuroscientist VS Ramachandran’s office and said he wanted his perfectly healthy arm amputated because he felt it did not belong to him. Ramachandran refused but the man went to Mexico and got his arm removed. “Mixed signals in his brain had made him feel like that. It is a condition known as xenomelia or the foreign limb syndrome where one does not accept one’s extremities,” said Ramachandran in his lecture ‘Embodied Minds, Disembodied Brains’ at the Asian College of Journalism on Friday.
The neuroscientist, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition University of California, San Diego, and author of the book ‘Phantoms in the Brain’, also spoke about several fascinating and puzzling neurological disorders, which are sometimes mistaken as mental illnesses. One of them was synesthesia, where you experience one of your senses through another. “Some see a number as being in a certain colour,” he said.
He explained how his invention – the mirror box – is used the world over to treat people with phantom limbs. The mirror box reflects the movements of the person’s functioning limb, making the brain believe that the phantom limb is real. “It is therapeutic, and through continuous practice, the phantom limb pain disappears.”
Ramachandran also spoke about “bogus syndromes”. “Among my favourites is the De Clérambault’s Syndrome where a young woman believes an older man of higher social status is in love with her," he said.
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