“Amputees needed” was the newspaper ad that neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran ran to recruit subjects for his phantom limb research back in the 1990s.
I’ve written about Ramachandran lots in these emails before. I read about him again last night, in a book about neuroplasticity. The story clicked with something I’ve been thinking about a lot, which seems very important to me, and which I wanted to share with you. In case you’re with me:
As you might know, “phantom limb” is a strange condition where people who have had a limb amputated, say, an arm, keep feeling that arm as being there. They can even feel the arm doing stuff like reaching out to pick up the phone.
Kind of weird already, but where it gets uncomfortable is that, for many amputees, these phantom limbs don’t move. Instead, the phantom limbs feel like they are paralyzed, frozen.
What’s worse, phantom limbs often cause agonizing pain, out in space, where there’s nothing, and where nothing can be done. Patients often contemplate suicide because it’s such an painful and maddening condition.
Phantom limb has been known as a phenomenon since the American Civil War, but it probably goes back to the beginnings of time, as long as humans, and their animal ancestors, were losing limbs.
Phantom limbs, weird and uncomfortable as they are, get at the core of being a living, thinking being. They make it very clear that we have no direct experience of what’s happening in our body or in the world outside us, but only mental representations of such.
But back to Ramachandran. Back in the 1990s, he managed to cure — eliminate — the phantom limb in a large number of amputees, and he done it in a curious, extremely low-tech way.
Basically, Ramachandran had the amputees view an image of their (still attached) arm, reflected in a mirror, doing stuff.
The crazy thing is, this was good enough to convince the amputees’ brains their amputated arm was somehow back.
The neurology isn’t 100% clear to me, but I guess the feedback these patients were getting, visually via the mirror and neurally from their (real, non-mirrored) arm, was somehow enough to rewire the maps in their brain that represent body image.
In other words, the phantom limb first stopped being paralyzed and in pain. The paralysis and pain gone, the phantom limb was finally free to wave goodbye and move on to Valhalla.
Once again, phantom limb is a condition that’s been around for as long as humans have been around, and probably longer. It’s been ruining the lives of those afflicted by it for thousands of years. The fix was so simple, and yet nobody thought of it until a few decades ago.
But there’s still a deeper point, and one I find myself thinking about a lot lately.
A hundred years ago, a psychologist named Jean Piaget found that children’s thinking is black and white, magical, absolute.
To children, ideas are the same as things, with the same concreteness and reality. An idea, if it pops up in a kid’s head, must be true, has always been true, will always be true, isn’t made false by evidence or by previous ideas that contradict it.
In time, we grow up, and we learn that an idea can be false, or a little bit true, or that there’s nuances and gradations, that we should look for support and proof.
But I’d like to claim, the kind of black-and-white, imagined-is-real thinking of children stays inside us forever. We learn to work with it and cover it up to ourselves, but it remains the baseline of how our brains work, how we perceive the world and ourselves.
If you doubt me, think of Ramachandran’s amputee patients. They weren’t idiots.
The “adult” part of them knew, while watching a mirror reflection of their real arm, that they hadn’t regrown their amputated arm. But it didn’t matter. The “child” part of the brain saw the phantom arm reappear, and could work with it, and stop it from being paralyzed and in pain.
As I write in my new 10 Commandments book, the human brain and the reality it creates for us are far stranger than we admit to ourselves on a daily basis. If you want to read some more ways about how to work with the “child” part of your prospect’s minds, and maybe even your own, for good and for profit, then you might like: