A strange disease, this woman's hand can attack himself

koebanget.blogspot.com Because of this strange disease attacked her hands herself. This strange disease called "Alien Hand Syndrome." Imagine being attacked by one of your own hands, which repeatedly tries to slap and punch you. Or you go to the store and when you try to turn right, one of your legs decides it wants to the left, leaving you walking round and round. Karen Byrne 55 years in New Jersey, which suffered from Alien Hand Syndrome.

His left hand, and occasionally her left leg, behaves as if it were under the control of a different creature. Karen condition is very interesting, not only because it is so strange but because it tells us something surprising about how our own brains work.

It started after Karen had surgery at age 27 to control his epilepsy, which has dominated his life since he was 10 years old. Surgery to cure epilepsy usually involves identifying and then cut off a small part of the brain where abnormal electrical signals originate.

When this does not work, or when the damaged area can not be identified, patients may be offered something more radical. In the case of Karen her surgeon cut her corpus callosum, a band of nerve fibers that make the two parts of the brain in constant contact.

The results of epilepsy surgery with Cutting the corpus callosum cured Karen, but left him with a completely different issue. Karen told me that initially everything seemed fine. Then the doctors seeing some very strange behavior.

"Dr O'Connor said 'Karen what are you doing, you undress your hand?'. Until he said that I did not know that my left hand to unbutton my shirt.

"So I started to put my shirt buttons back to the right hand, so I stopped, my left hand started unbuttoning. Then he segeral make an emergency call through to one of the other doctors., And said, 'Mike you've gotta be here, we have problem '. "

"I lit a cigarette, and put it in the ashtray, and then I'll turn off the left hand cigarette. This will take the items out of my bag and I would not realize that I would have walked. Lot of things before I realized what was happening . "

Karen problems caused by power struggles going on in his head. A normal brain consists of two hemispheres that communicate with each other through the corpus callosum.

The left hemisphere, which controls the right arm and leg, tends to be where language skills are. The right hemisphere, which controls the left arm and leg, is largely responsible for spatial awareness and recognize patterns. Usually the more analytical left brain dominates, having the final say in the actions that we do.

Discovery of hemispherical dominance has its roots in the 1940's, when surgeons first decided to treat epilepsy by cutting the corpus callosum. Once they have recovered, the patient looks normal. But in psychology circles they became legends.

That's because the patient will, in time, reveal something that for me was really surprising, the two halves of our brains each contain a kind of separate consciousness. Each hemisphere would be able to self.