Prosthetic limbs represented like hands in brain

The human brain can take advantage of brain resources originally devoted to the hand to represent a prosthetic limb, a new UCL-led study concludes. Among people with only one hand, the brain area that enables us to recognise hands can also recognise a prosthetic hand, particularly among those who use a prosthesis regularly, according to the new Brain paper. The study provides the first account of how artificial limbs are represented in the brains of amputees. "While the use of a prosthesis can be very beneficial to people with one hand, most people with one hand prefer not to use one regularly, so understanding how they can be more user-friendly could be very valuable," said the study's lead author, Dr Tamar Makin (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience). "If we can convince a person's brain that the artificial limb is the person's real limb, we could make prostheses more comfortable and easier to use." The study included 32 people with one hand - half of whom were born with one hand and half had lost a hand due to amputation - alongside 24 people with two hands, used as a control group, most of whom were family or friends of the people with one hand. The participants were shown images of prosthetic hands (including photos of their own prostheses) as well as real limbs. A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan was used to assess the participants' neural responses.