Phantom Pains

This article focuses on phantom pains. People with amputated limbs wonder if they are actually feeling something touch them or if it is just a figment of their imagination. In this article researchers gave their opinions on why this happens and they explained why it is possible. It talks about the primary somatosensory cortex, primary visual cortex, and the motor cortex function before and after the limb has been amputated. The researchers use an illusion called cutaneous rabbit illusion, which consist of electrodes and an fMRI machine to try and better understand how tactile illusions act in the brain. The author believes that these methods are affective for dealing with phantom pains.
The strongest feature of this argument is the use of the two experiment examples, the tactile illusion and visual mistakes. The tactile illusion consists of ten participants who receive electrodes at three different places on their arm between the wrist and elbow. The participants laid in an fMRI machine while the researchers distributed pulses to the electrodes and they stated whether they felt the imaginary and actual sensations at the same strength. The visual mistakes had four participants that laid in an fMRI machine and were shown a pixelated image that …show more content…
Knowing these things supports the experiments discussed in this article, giving them credibility and making the experiments trustworthy. In order to conduct an Electroencephalogram, you have to attach some type of electrodes to the scalp directly and use a special solution to help determine the electrical signals happening in the cortex just below (Ciccarelli and White, 2015, p.69). However, in the cutaneous rabbit illusion discussed in this article they do not use either of those processes which makes you stop and think if this experiment is actually