Researchers Identify Phantom Limb Brain Activity

mmmscience writes "Researchers in Switzerland think they had identified the regions of the brain responsible for creating phantom limbs and the senses that go along with them. Scientists studied a stroke victim who claimed that the phantom limb of her now-paralyzed left arm could do a number of things a normal limb could do, including 'scratch an itch on her head, with an actual sense of relief.'"

Comments

Re:A serious question

[Anonymous Coward]

Kind of, but I'm not so sure I'd call it "phantom".
The genital reconstruction surgery isn't as much about losing a limb as it is about reconstructing an already present limb into something else. They don't just cut off the penis and replace it by a carved out hole but what they do is to use a lot of the material from the penis to create a vagina. They sort of "invert it". The tissue is still there, the nerves are still there (they reconnect amazingly well) so mostly nothing is lost, just changed. They take away most of the erectile tissue but some of it still there and it will create about the same sensation as an erection. I'd say that essentially the erection is real, there just isn't very much to erect anymore.

(Disclaimer: I used to work at a gender clinic but am no surgeon)