Curse of the Phantom Limbs

Programme Outline

An itch that you cannot reach is bad enough, but what if it is on part of the body that does not exist any more? An investigation of the phenomenon of phantom limbs and what they reveal about how the brain works.

00.00—05.30
Introduction — phantom limbs: the strange and sometimes painful sensations felt by people who have lost limbs or other appendages through accidents or surgery. Jackie Naylor, a Yorkshire woman who lost her lower arm in a car accident but can still feel it. Peter Halligan, an Oxford neuropsychologist who is trying to build up a picture of the phantom sensations experienced by Jackie and other sufferers.

05.30—08.15
Artist Alexa Wright, whose digitally manipulated photographs record patients’ changing sense of their own phantom limbs.

08.15—11.40
Neuroscientist Dr Ramachandran of the University of California and patients who have experienced a phantom appendix or phantom leg after surgery to remove the real item. Canadian psychologist Professor Melzack describes some of the ways that the nervous system has been cut or blocked to try to stop pain experienced from phantom limbs — all without success.

11.40—18.30
The motorcyclist whose nerves linking his arm to his spine were ripped apart in a motorcycle crash. Although not an amputee, he experiences phantom pains from the arm which has no direct links into his nervous system. The phenomenon of ‘imprinting’, where the retained memory of the lost limb is the last experience with that limb — for example, being crushed in an accident, or blasted by an exploding firework.

18.30—23.30
The onset at age 4 or 5, of phantom limb sensations in children born without particular limbs. The idea of neural networks, or a neuromatrix, which actually generate a body image in the mind. In neural terms, a phantom limb is a real limb, and the pain may result from sending ever-stronger signals to a limb that the brain does not recognise as missing.

23.30—29.30
The Silver Springs monkeys, who had nerves severed as part of a research project, and then became the focus for an 11-year battle between scientists, the courts and animal rights activists. The surprising results when scientists regained custody and monitored the brain activity when certain parts of their bodies were stimulated, leading to the idea that the brain can re-organise itself after the loss of a limb or loss of neural contact with a limb. The work in the 1950s of Dr Wilder Penfield, who stimulated different parts of the exposed brain cortex of patients who were fully conscious and discovered what was essentially a ‘map’ of the human body — Penfield’s Homunculus — on the surface of the brain.

29.30—38.30
Californian neuroscientist Ramachandran and his radical new theory, called critical re-mapping, to account for the phenomenon of phantom limbs. The theory goes against a 40-year orthodoxy that the brain is ‘hard-wired’ for life. His experiments with mirror boxes, and Melzack’s sceptical response to the theory and the experiments.

38.30—46.00
Surgeons in Oxford draw on Ramachandran’s idea and Penfield’s work in the 1950s to try, for the first time, to identify the area of an exposed brain associated with an individual’s phantom limb sensation. An electrode is attached to the relevant area and attached to an external stimulator, which it is hoped, will reduce or eliminate pains experienced from the phantom limb.

46.00—end
New research into the Alice-in-Wonderland syndrome, in which sufferers have a strong sensation of much or all of their body shrinking in size. Its link with severe migraine, and the possibility that the concept of body is influenced by blood flow to different parts of the ‘body map’ on the surface of the cortex. The way that strange conditions like phantom limbs and Alice-in-Wonderland syndrome are revitalising neuroscience research and throwing new light on the way our brains work.