Phantom Limbs

Share or suggest your experiments and tests to know the phase better
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Summerlander
PHASER
PHASER
Posts: 1263
Joined: Wed Apr 06, 2011 5:57 pm
Location: UK

Phantom Limbs

Post by Summerlander »

People who have been amputated or are missing limbs from congenital disease can experience the phenomenon of phantom limbs, i.e., the sensation that a limb is present when it is, in fact, physically absent. Recent studies show that, not only the somatosensory cortex does not require visual or sensory input to represent a body structure, but that phantom limbs are disproportionate representations by our brains of what would otherwise be physically in place.

Check out the tests on 'CL' conducted by cognitive neuroscientist Matthew Longo and his team at Birkbeck, University of London:
http://bbk.ac.uk/psychology/bodylab/research.html
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/23/7/740.full.pdf+html

I was immediately reminded of how my hands looked a few times in the phase state (lucid dreaming/out-of-body experiences). According to the experimental work by Longo and Patrick Haggard at the University College London, the phantom hand is wider than the real hand and has shorter fingers. Here are a few depictions of what my hands have looked like in the phase:

Sometimes we catch our minds in the middle of constructing the model:
Image

The phantom hands here are beefier than real hands and can often be more toned:
Image

This is a good example because it shows how large the phantom hands can be, but sometimes they lack colour and opacity:
Image

I have noticed, in my case, that my phantom hands tended to be bigger in my earliest phase experiences, but now they tend to be more accurate. Has my mind evolved to automatically create a more accurate representation in the light of my conscious dreaming prowess? It seems that way. It is important to point out that the phantom limbs in the phase world don't always have to be wider than the real hands. We can make them shrink if we wish to do so. But the tendency for them to be bigger than the real thing certainly seemed to be there at the initial stages of my practice.

What is your case regarding phantom libs?
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