The Itch

Dont have a heart attack. I am blogging about something thats has nothing to do with salvage!

A fascinating article about iching and sensory perception.
Haha – its so funny how reading the stuff about itching actually set of lil itchy spots on different parts of my body.

I had a really bad rash a few years back for quite a while before I found something to get rid of it and I learnt to will myself not to scratch all the time (especially at work) so now I am pretty good at ignoring my own itches even if they are really bad. And I dont know if this happens to anyone else but when I ignore an itch the feeling changes to a sort of burning feeling just before it finally fades.

Anyways I think the stuff in the article about how they are using mirrors to help people with phantom limb pain is really interesting.

“They put their surviving arm through a hole in the side of a box with a mirror inside, so that, peering through the open top, they would see their arm and its mirror image, as if they had two arms. Ramachandran then asked them to move both their intact arm and, in their mind, their phantom arm-to pretend that they were conducting an orchestra, say. The patients had the sense that they had two arms again. Even though they knew it was an illusion, it provided immediate relief. People who for years had been unable to unclench their phantom fist suddenly felt their hand open; phantom arms in painfully contorted positions could relax. With daily use of the mirror box over weeks, patients sensed their phantom limbs actually shrink into their stumps and, in several instances, completely vanish.”