William James

“ Many patients tell how they met with accidents, by rising suddenly and starting to walk as if their leg were still there, or by getting out of bed in the same way. Others tell how they have involuntarily put down their hand to scratch their departed foot. One man writes that he found himself preparing with scissors to cut its nails, so distinctly did he feel them. Generally the position of the lost leg follows that of the stump and artificial leg. If one is flexed the other seems flexed; if one is extended so is the other; if one swings in walking the other swings with it. ”

“ Most of the patients who seem to themselves able to move their lost feet, hands, etc., at will, produce a distinct contraction of the muscles of the stump whenever they make the voluntary effort. As the principle of specific energies easily accounted for the consciousness of the lost limb being there at all, so here another principle, almost as universally adopted by psychologists, accounts as easily for the consciousness of movement in it, and leaves the real puzzle to reside rather in those cases in which the illusion of movement fails to exist. ”

“ From the earliest ancestors of ours which had feet, down to the present day, the movement of the feet must always have accompanied the contraction of the muscles; and here, if anywhere, habit's hereditary consequences ought to be found, if the principle that habits are transmitted from one generation to another is sound at all. [11] No sooner then should the brain-centres for perceiving muscular contractions be excited, than those other centres functionally consolidated with them ought to share the excitement, and produce a consciousness that the foot has moved. ”

“ Now it is a general law of consciousness that feelings of which we make no practicable use tend to become more and more overlooked. Helmholtz has explained our habitual insensibility to double images, to the so-called muscæ volitantes caused by specks in the humors of the eye, to the upper harmonics which accompany various sounds, as so many effects of the persistent abstraction of our attention from impressions which are of no use. ”

“ When the foot which the eye sees and the hand touches is cut off, still the immediate inner feeling of it persists so long as the brain-centres retain their functions; and, in the absence of any counter-motive, it ought, one would think, to continue located about where it used to be. There would be a counter-motive, if nerves which in the unamputated man went to the foot and were excited every time the foot was touched, were to find themselves, after the amputation, excited every time the stump was touched. ”

“ I have, perhaps, by invoking certain well-known principles, succeeded in making the fundamental illusions, that of the existence, and that of the movement of the lost part, seem less paradoxical, and the exceptions to these illusions less odd than they have hitherto appeared. ”

“ The consciousness of the lost limb varies from acute pain, pricking, itching, burning, cramp, uneasiness, numbness, etc., in the toes, heel, or other place, to feelings which are hardly perceptible, or which become perceptible only after a good deal of "thinking." The feeling is not due to the condition of the stump, for in both painful and healthy stumps it may be either present or absent. Where it is distinct both the lost foot or hand and the stump are felt simultaneously, each in its own place. ”

“ The popular mind wonders how the lost feet can still be felt. For us, the cases for wonder are those in which the lost feet are not felt. The first explanation which one clutches at, for the loss, is that the nerve-centres for perception may degenerate and grow atrophic when the sensory nerve-terminations which normally stimulate them are cut off. ”

“ Surely if there be any distant material object with which a man might be supposed to have clairvoyant or telepathic relations, that object ought to be his own cut-off arm or leg. Accordingly, a very wide-spread belief will have it, that when the cut-off limb is maltreated in any way, the man, no matter where he is, will feel the injury. ”

“ But although, in a gross sense, we are thus forced to conclude that neither the state of the stump nor the place of the amputation absolutely determines the differences of consciousness which different individuals show, it is nevertheless hard to believe that they are not amongst the more important influencing conditions of the illusion which we are studying. ”

“ In all perception, indeed, but half of the object comes from without. The larger half usually comes out of our own head. We can ourselves produce an illusion of movement similar to those which we are studying by putting some unyielding substance (hard rubber, e.g.) between our back teeth and biting hard. It is difficult not to believe that our front teeth approach each other, when we feel our biting muscles contract. [13] In ourselves the feeling of the real position of the jaws persists unchanged to contradict the false suggestion. ”

“ It may be that in certain subjects this sort of abstraction is able to complete our oblivescence of a lost foot; our feeling of it has been already reduced almost to the vanishing point, by reason of the shielded condition of the nerve-ends, just assigned. The feeling of the lost foot tells us absolutely nothing which can practically be of use to us. ”

“ A nineteen-year-old girl and a man in the forties, who had each but one normal hand, the other, instead of fingers, having only little prominences of skin without bones or muscles, thought they bent their absent fingers when they bent the deformed stump. Tickling these eminences, or binding a string about the fore-arm, caused the same sensations as in amputated persons, and a pressure on the ulnar nerve made the outer fingers tingle. ”

“ Exceptions remain to every empirical law of our mental life, and can only be treated as so many individual aberrations. It is perhaps something to have pointed out the department of lost-limb-consciousness as that in which the aberrant individuals are likely to reach their maximum number. ”

“ Suffice it to say, that in many patients the lost foot can be made to feel warm or cold by warming or cooling the stump. A draught of air on the stump produces the feeling of a draught on the foot. The lost foot also sympathizes sometimes with the foot which remains. If one is cold, the other feels cold. One man writes that whenever he walks through puddles and wets his sound foot, his lost foot feels wet too. ”

“ They form a group in which the variations from one individual to another, if they exist at all, are likely to become extreme. Darwin notices that no organs in animals are so subject to variation as rudimentary organs. Being functionless, selection has no hold on them, the environment exerts no influence to keep them up (or down) to the proper standard, and the consequence is that their aberrations are unchecked. ”

“ At the places where the amputation is apt to be made, the nerves which supply the foot are all buried deeply in the tissues. Superficial contact with the stump never excites, therefore, the sensibility of the foot-nerves. All ordinary contacts of the stump, thus failing to awaken the foot-feeling in any noticeable way, that feeling fails to grow associated with the stump's experiences ”

“ The hand and foot are usually the only lost parts very distinctly felt, the intervening tracts seeming to disappear. A man, for example, whose arm was cut off at the shoulder-joint told me that he felt his hand budding immediately from his shoulder. ”

“ As the optical centres respond to stimulation by the feeling of forms and colors, and the acoustic centres by that of sounds, so do certain other centres respond by the feeling of a foot, with its toes, heel, etc. This feeling is what Johannes Müller called the "specific energy" of the neural tracts involved. It makes no difference how the tracts are excited, that feeling of a foot is their only possible response. So long as they feel at all, what they feel is the foot. ”

“ They have no longer any real relations with the environment, being mere vestiges of something which formerly had real relations. The environment does not correct such a phantasm for any odd course it may get into. If it slips away altogether, the environment lets it go, and doesn't call it back. If it happen "by accident" to harden itself in a fixed position, or shorten itself, or to dissolve connection with its ancestral associates in the way of muscular feeling, the accident is not repaired ”

“ The most perfect illusions are those of false motion, relief, or concavity, changed size, distance, etc., produced when, by artificial means, an object gives us sensations, or forces us to move our eyes in ways ordinarily suggestive of the presence of an entirely different object. ”

“ Many patients with thigh amputation feel, more or less distinctly, their knee, or their calf. But even where they do not, the foot may seem separate from the stump, though possibly located nearer it than natural. ”

“ When they "grow inattentive," the feeling "dies back," or "jumps back to the stump." Every degree of consciousness, from complete and permanent hallucination, down to something hardly distinguishable from ordinary fancy, seems represented in the sense of the missing extremity which these patients say they have. ”

“ All (with perhaps one exception which, unfortunately, I have lost) are vaguely told; and, indeed, amongst all the pains which come and go in the first weeks of amputation, it would be strange if some did not coincide with events happening to the buried or "pickled" limb. One man writes me that he has dug up his buried leg eight times, and changed its position. ”

“ Many persons with lost limbs still seem to feel them in their old place. This illusion is so well known, and the material for study is so abundant, that it seems strange that no more systematic effort to investigate the phenomenon should have been made. ”

“ In the same way persons born with a much shortened arm have stated the length of this member to be greater than it really was. An individual whose right fore-arm almost entirely failed, so that the dwarfed hand seemed to spring from the elbow, was conscious of the misshapen arm as normal and almost as long as the other. ”