Reading Blindly: Literature, Otherness, and the Possibility of an ...

longer can control them with his brain—but are very much present, slipping in and out of his presence and disappearing the moment he attempts to directly confront them.

Here one must consider if a phantom limb has effects only because one has a memory of its sensation, a memory of the sensation that was caused by stimuli to the limb before its absence. In other words, is the sensation felt by the patient merely that of a psychological effect? Or, more precisely, is the sensation felt by the patient the result of both the memory of the limb and also the forgetting of the fact that the limb itself is missing? For if the missing limb remains in the consciousness of the patient, then would it not be unlikely that (s)he feels a sensation in it? If the sensation is triggered by an affect of memory, this suggests that it must be beyond merely physiological stimuli; since all external stimuli are absent, it is almost as if the patient feels the sensation because there is an anticipation of what is to be felt. This is perhaps a similar sensation to that one feels just before one is tickled: the only way in which one can feel ticklish even before actual physical stimuli is experienced is because one knows what feeling ticklish is. In effect, the ticklishness is anticipated and then is felt by the person. ⁴

This might be why the most successful attempts to treat patients with phantom-limb pain have involved the imagination. One such instance is the “mirror box” that was created by Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and colleagues. A “mirror box” is a box with two mirrors in the center, one facing each way. A patient inserts her or his hand into one hole and her or his “phantom hand” into the other. When viewed from an angle, the brain is tricked into seeing two complete hands. The “mirror box” treatment is based on an observation that phantom-limb patients were more likely to report paralyzed and painful phantoms if the limb was paralyzed prior to amputation. The hypothesis is that every time the patient attempts to move her or his limb, (s)he receives sensory feedback that the limb is