Creating Phantom Sensation in Non-amputees
Ian C. Langtree - Writer/Editor for Disabled World (DW)
Published: 2013/04/15 - Updated: 2025/02/11
Publication Type: Reports & Proceedings
Topic: Prostheses / Prosthetics - Publications List
Page Content: Synopsis - Introduction - Main
Synopsis: The experience of phantom limbs is not unique to amputated individuals and can easily be created in non-amputees.
Why it matters: This report discusses a study by neuroscientists at Sweden's Karolinska Institutet, published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, which demonstrates that phantom limb sensations can be induced in individuals without amputations. In the experiment, participants experienced the illusion of having an invisible hand when researchers simultaneously touched the participant's hidden real hand and mimicked the movements in mid-air within the participant's view. This led to increased activity in brain regions associated with touch perception, suggesting that the brain can integrate the sensation of an invisible hand into the body's representation. These findings enhance our understanding of how the brain constructs the sense of body ownership and may inform future research on phantom limb pain in amputees - Disabled World (DW).
Introduction
Scientists create phantom sensations in non-amputees. The sensation of having a physical body is not as self-evident as one might think. Almost everyone who has had an arm or leg amputated experiences a phantom limb - a vivid sensation that the missing limb is still present.
Main Item
A new study by neuroscientists at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden shows that it is possible to evoke the illusion of having a phantom hand in non-amputated individuals. In an article in the scientific periodical Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, the researchers describe a perceptual illusion in which healthy volunteers experience having an invisible hand.
The experiment involves the participant sitting at a table with their right arm hidden from their view behind a screen. To evoke the illusion, the scientist touches the right hand of the participant with a small paintbrush while imitating the exact movements with another paintbrush in mid-air within full view of the participant.
"We discovered that most participants, within less than a minute, transfer the sensation of touch to the region of empty space where they see the paintbrush move, and experience an invisible hand in that position," says Arvid Guterstam, lead author of the study.
"Previous research has shown that non-bodily objects, such as a block of wood, cannot be experienced as one's own hand, so we were extremely surprised to find that the brain can accept an invisible hand as part of the body."
The study comprises eleven experiments that explore in detail the illusory experience and include 234 volunteers.
To demonstrate that the illusion actually worked, the researchers would make a stabbing motion with a knife towards the empty space "occupied" by the invisible hand and measure the participant's sweat response to the perceived threat. They found that the participants' stress responses were elevated while experiencing the illusion but absent when the illusion was broken.
In another experiment, the volunteers were asked to close their eyes and quickly point with their left hand to their right hand (or to where they perceived it to be). After having experienced the illusion for a while, they would point to the location of the invisible hand rather than to their real hand.
The researchers also measured the brain activity of the participants using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Perceiving the invisible hand illusion led to increased activity in the same parts of the brain that are normally active when individuals see their real hand being touched or when participants experience a prosthetic hand as their own.
"Taken together, our results show that the sight of a physical hand is remarkably unimportant to the brain for creating the experience of one's physical self," says Arvid Guterstam.
The researchers hope that the results of their study will offer insight into future research on phantom pain in amputees.
"This illusion suggests that the experience of phantom limbs is not unique to amputated individuals, but can easily be created in non-amputees," says the principal investigator, Dr. Henrik Ehrsson, docent at the Department of Neuroscience.
"These results add to our understanding of how phantom sensations are produced by the brain, which can contribute to future research on alleviating phantom pain in amputees."
The study was funded by the European Research Council, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research, the Human Frontier Science Program, the McDonnell Foundation, and Saderbergska Stiftelsen.
Publication
'The invisible hand illusion: Multi-sensory integration leads to the embodiment of a discrete volume of empty space', Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Arvid Guterstam, Giovanni Gentile & Henrik Ehrsson, online 11 April 2013.