Optical distortion and pain
This is boggling my mind; according to a study at Oxford University, pain and swelling in an aching hand can be controlled, by making the hand look larger or smaller. When I first read that, I immediately thought that the change in visual size may affect the way in which pain is reported by the patient, if the way it’s reported is visual. But swelling? That’s extremely interesting. Both pain and swelling were increased or decreased depending on whether the patient’s hand was magnified or minimized. Lorimer Mosley’s study is covered in Neurophilosophy, who writes;
Exactly how a distortion of the body image modulates painful sensations is unclear. It may be the case that magnifying the body leads to an enhancement of the sense of touch. Some evidence for this comes from a 2001 study which showed that the ability to discriminate between two tactile stimuli was improved by magnification of the arm, and a neuroimaging study published earlier this year, which showed that magnification of the arm alters its somatosensory representation. By the same token, minifying a part of the body would have the opposite effect on tactile sensations.
December 1st, 2008 at 3:23 pm
It’s not so crazy as it might sound.
We (therapists) have to get rid of the notion that we treat the actual human body during therapy.
What the research is pointing towards is that we are “merely” treating the virtual body that the brain constructs on the basis of cortical maps on the brains surface. And that’s what counts.
If such a map becomes enlarged the brain “thinks” that more blood supply is needed and swelling could occur. Or vice versa.
I always tell my students that they have to stop thinking in terms of hardware – but more in terms of software that then starts to change the hardware all by itself.
December 1st, 2008 at 5:00 pm
Interesting. Have you tried using a lens in your work as a physical therapist- to try and fool the body into thinking that it isn’t as badly injured as it thinks it is?
Is there a danger, if you did something like that, that the body would not protect itself enough to recover properly?
December 3rd, 2008 at 12:37 pm
Hi, I came here via the Telegraph article – I write children’s books and love video games, so find your project fascinating. Anyway, this post reminded me of something that happens to me from time to time: I am quite severely short sighted (-3.50; -4.50) and I have sometimes found that if I leave my contact lenses out, not only can I not see as well, I can’t hear as well either. I think that being unsure of one sense makes me lose confidence in others, or perhaps, conversely, makes me focus on other senses more/ differently so they seem distorted and so less reliable. Interesting stuff… maybe not relevant, but interesting
December 3rd, 2008 at 4:07 pm
Sounds pretty alarming Leila! A Stanford study on Owls found that there is a link between sight and sound;
http://www.bio-medicine.org/biology-news/Stanford-study-of-owls-finds-link-in-brain-between-sight-and-sound-2463-1/
“What our experiment demonstrates is a fundamental principle of how the brain pays attention,” said the paper’s senior author, Eric Knudsen, PhD, the Edward C. and Amy H. Sewall Professor of Neurobiology. “The promise here is that because we are doing this in owls, we can get at the mechanisms of how this works.”
The study determined that the circuits in the brain that process auditory information are influenced powerfully by the circuits that control where the animal is looking-the animal’s direction of gaze.