Prosthetic Hand Capable of Delivering Texture Sensations

Zothecula writes: A new prosthetic system allows amputees to feel familiar sensations and also, somewhat unexpectedly, reduces their phantom pain. Researchers at Case Western Reserve University and the Louis Stokes Cleveland Veterans Affairs Medical Center developed the system to reactivate areas of the brain that produce the sense of touch, but recipients of prosthetic hands reported their phantom pain subsiding almost completely after being hooked up to the system.

Not a medical professional, but:

[kheldan]

Seems to me that when some area of your body doesn't get much or any stimulation for long periods of time, it gets more sensitive. If you lose a limb the associated sensory nerves get zero stimulation, as well as the associated area of the brain. Wouldn't those nerves and that part of your brain 'turn up the gain' and experience more 'noise' in the absence of 'signal' (hence 'phantom pain')? Then you attach something that provides a 'signal' again; 'gain' goes down, S/N ratio goes up?

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[timeOday]

Yeah, it makes me wonder if phantom limb pains couldn't be alleviated with just a therapy session of random stimulation every once in a while. (Obviously this research in re-enabling some sense of touch/pressure is much greater than that.)

Re:Not a medical professional, but:

[gstoddart]

Seems to me that when some area of your body doesn't get much or any stimulation for long periods of time, it gets more sensitive

Must ... not ... make ... penis ... joke ...

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[Frosty Piss]

Prosthetic Hand Capable of Delivering Texture Sensations

...to my penis.

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[K. S. Kyosuke]

Why would anyone joke about not making penises?

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[BringsApples]

Yeah, that's exactly what they say happens. I don't know from experience, but I did see a really good documentary on a doctor that discovered that by simply tricking the brain, causing the phantom pain to go away. The patient that he was working with lost their hand and about 3/4 of the arm to the elbow. The patient reported that it felt as if his hand was squeezing harder and harder (as you point out, 'turning up the gain' and experience more 'noise'). So the doctor decided to try out setting up a mirr [youtube.com]

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[tiberus]

There is also a side-show like display where a persons hand is hidden behind a partition and a fake hand (placed where there hand 'should' be) is struck with a hammer causing the subject to flinch and act as their hand had been hurt. Brain Games mucked about with this one on of their shows. While this may just be triggering a fight of flight response, it interesting the note that the irrational portion of the brain seems to override the rational part (the one that 'knows' your hand is safe). After readin

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[ArcadeMan]

There's your problem right there: you're not supposed to have a coin in your brain.

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[gstoddart]

While this may just be triggering a fight of flight response, it interesting the note that the irrational portion of the brain seems to override the rational part (the one that 'knows' your hand is safe). After reading BringsApples post it struck me that these two cases may be opposite sides of the same coin.

Well, here I'd substitute rational/irrational with 'conscious' and 'primitive'.

You as a human know you are missing your hand (or in the case of your example that your hand isn't really going to get hit)

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[EnempE]

Very interesting. Not quite the same as the article because the subject in this case is blindfolded and its a referred sensation.
Nonetheless I didn't know about this and was happy for the reference.
I think the /. appropriate content is at the links below

Synaethesia in phantom limbs induced with mirrors (1996)
V.S. Ramachandran & D Rogers-Ramachandran
http://chip.ucsd.edu/pdf/Synst... [ucsd.edu]

Phantoms Limbs and Neural Plasticity
V.S. Ramachandran & D Rogers-Ramachandran (2000)
http://www.neurosci [neurosciences.us]

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[rogoshen1]

By documentary, did you mean House MD? :)

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[BringsApples]

No. I couldn't find it on youtube, and the one that I did find wasn't the same type of box as in the documentary that I originally remember seeing. The only difference between the one in the video that I posted and the one that I originally saw, was that the mirror was at a 45 degree angle, so that you wouldn't have to look at it from the side.

I looked so much that now I think that maybe I'm remembering it wrong. All the same, it'd be better if it were at a 45 degree angle, so that you could simply lo

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[Ultra64]

"I didnâ(TM)t read the TFA,"

Obviously.

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[Daetrin]

Please don't take this wrong, but i took a quick look at your comment history and between that and what you've posted here you're sounding an awful lot like a friend i used to know. At first i thought she was just a little odd, but it turned out that she actually had some serious problems and some pretty bad stuff ended up happening because of it. If you really believe the things you're saying i think you should really consider talking to someone. I expect you'd be resistant to the idea of going to a psychi

Nerve mapping?

[DoofusOfDeath]

Can anyone here explain to me the issue if/how we can map nerves correctly?

For example: suppose someone's finger gets cut off, and then surgeons manage to reattach it.

I assume that since there are many distinct sensory nerve endings on a finger, each of those must be carried along a distinct electrical pathway up to the brain.

When a surgeon reattaches a finger, does he/she somehow get all of those hundreds(?) of connections to be lined up properly so that the mapping is the same as it was before the accident? If so, how? If not, what happens?

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[gstoddart]

I think that if you re-attach soon enough, the nerves end up re-mapping to the neurons as your brain sorts out what's what.

Over time, your brain figures out that this particular one doesn't quite match what it used to, and then maps to the one which is there now.

I suspect during the initial period until the nerves sort themselves out, you have really mismatched/clumsy sensation, but over time as the brain and neurons sort everything out it gets better.

Of course, I'll freely admit I have no real understandin

Well duh

[Daetrin]

"A new prosthetic system allows amputees to feel familiar sensations and also, somewhat unexpectedly, reduces their phantom pain."

This seems like one of those things that people might very reasonably not think of ahead of time but which seems blindingly obvious in retrospect. It would probably be expected that if you managed to reattach a severed limb that there wouldn't be any phantom pain afterward. ("Real" pain during the healing process yes, and perhaps lingering aches as one might have with any injury, but not phantom pain.) You'd also expect the same to hold true if you managed to grow a new arm and attach it properly.

But a simple prosthetic isn't enough to prevent or cure phantom pain. So one would expect that at _some_ point in the process between no nerve connections with a peg leg (or equivalent) and full connection with a regrown/reattached limb that the phantom pain would disappear. I guess they just encountered that point earlier than they might have expected.

In hindsight

[blueshift_1]

This is one of those obvious things that makes more sense afterward. Clearly the nerves have had years of constant input and you just take that away... it make sense that system would create false/phantom input as an assumption that it should be receiving some sort of signal. By increasing the amount of input, it creates a more normal state for the body... the more you knooooow.

What if Oracle happens to have patents on the API

[Mister Liberty]

You can't even give Larry Ellison the middle finger.

nice

[ilusion17]

great man....nonton bokep gratis [bokepmaniak.com]