The patient places the unaffected limb into one side, and the stump into the other. You can read more about mirror therapy through Stephen Sumner's experience who lost his limb some years ago. To retrain the brain, and thereby eliminate the learned paralysis, Ramachandran and Rogers-Ramachandran created the mirror box. This feedback stamped itself into the brain circuitry through a process of Hebbian learning, so that, even when the limb was no longer present, the brain had learned that the limb (and subsequent phantom) was paralysed. Their hypothesis was that every time the patient attempted to move the paralysed limb, they received sensory feedback (through vision and proprioception) that the limb did not move. The visual feedback, from viewing the reflection of the intact limb in place of the phantom limb, made it possible for the patient to perceive movement in the phantom limb. Ramachandran and Rogers-Ramachandran first devised the technique in an attempt to help those with phantom limb pain resolve what they termed a ‘learned paralysis’ of the painful phantom limb.
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