Abstract
This article examines the material culture of neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran’s research into phantom limbs. In the 1990s Ramachandran used a ‘mirror box’ to ‘resurrect’ phantom limbs and thus to treat the pain that often accompanied them. The experimental success of his mirror therapy led Ramachandran to see mirrors as a useful model of brain function, a tendency that explains his attraction to work on ‘mirror neurons’. I argue that Ramachandran’s fascination with and repeated appeal to the mirror can be explained by the way it allowed him to confront a perennial problem in the mind and brain sciences, that of the relationship between a supposedly immaterial mind and a material brain. By producing what Ramachandran called a ‘virtual reality’, relating in varied and complex ways to the material world, the mirror reproduced a form of psycho-physical parallelism and dualistic ontology, while conforming to the materialist norms of neuroscience today.
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Subject
History,Medicine (miscellaneous),General Nursing
Reference80 articles.
1. V.S. Ramachandran and D. Rogers-Ramachandran, Its All Done with Mirrors: Reflections on the familiar and yet deeply enigmatic nature of the looking glass, Scientific American Mind, August/September 2007, 16–18 .
2. V.S. Ramachandran and William Hirstein, ‘The Perception of Phantom Limbs: The D.O. Hebb Lecture’, Brain, 121 (1998), 1603–630: 1604.
3. Such persistence also helped explain the phenomenon of neglect, which Ramachandran thought of as the ‘converse of the phantom limb experience’. Here patients would refuse to acknowledge a paralysed limb, because the reality of the body image in the parietal lobe trumped the evidence that an arm, for example, could not move. Ramachandran, op. cit. (note 38), 314.
4. Ibid., 105.
5. Ramachandranand Rogers-Ramachandran, op. cit. (note 1), 379ff.
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