Phantombulb Case Study Psychology

The Phantom limb is a sensation experienced by someone who has had a limb amputated that the limb is still there. People who have had their limb or some other part of their body part amputated, still experience this. They still feel pain and experience the sensation that it is still attached to the body. The explanation for the phantom limb pain range from injured nerve endings where the limb was lost to changes in the brain areas connected with the missing limb. Phantom limbs also allow us to explore early sensory deprivation and the manner in which the brain sees a body image throughout life. In the profile of Derek, he lost his arm in a motorcycle accident. He pulled the nerves out of his spinal cord in his neck. After the surgery, Derek reported that he still felt his arm. He felt pain at his arm that was amputated. He also reported that he felt tingling whenever he shaved the left side of his face. V.S. Ramachandran did a simple lab test on Derek. When Ramachandran touched certain parts of Derek’s face, Derek felt it on his missing arm as well. According to Ramachandran’s theory, the cognitive explanation for this is that, the entire left side of the body, the skin surface, is mapped on to the right side of the brain …show more content…
Thus there is a reorganization of the brain, in which axonal branches sprouted up from facial cortex across amputated limbs area. Sensations in the phantom limb can simultaneously be felt in the face. This may mean that the actual physical sensations the patients are experiencing are being processed by the face, but associated with the missing limb. Although the cause of phantom limb sensations is still not known, it has been suggested that the trauma of amputation surgery on the nerves could lead to unusual levels of ectopic discharge which could be translated in the brain as pain. Because it has also been confirmed that