Amputation reduced the speed of voluntary movements with the phantom limb but did not change the speed of imagined movements, suggesting that the absence of the limb specifically affects the ability to voluntarily move the phantom but does not change the ability to imagine moving the missing limb.
After seeing a documentary about Coney Island, Webber decided to move the Phantom there, picking up the project again in 2006.
Vividness of Imagery Scale (Lotze et al., 2001 ): to measure the vividness of each subject's perception of their ability to move the phantom limb, where 0 = no perception of any voluntary movement to 6 = very vivid perception of voluntary phantom movement.
For the second scan, we fixed an RF surface coil on top of the phantom using adhesive tape, as seen in part (b) of Fig. 3, without moving the phantom.
Observers were provided haptic feedback consistent with the simulated 3-D shapes, i.e. inconsistent with the initial percepts of concavity, and asked to report the shape between the two green dots while moving the Phantom cursor between the two red dots, thus keeping a constant distance of 3.98 deg between locations of touching and seeing, with or without a gap of 0.53 deg.
Then the objective is switched to the 40 × objective without moving the phantom.
Once the activity has decayed (after an interval of 10 h or more), a transmission scan is performed without moving the phantom from its position in the PET or PET/CT system.
This, together with the fact that amputees report being able to move their phantom voluntarily [20], [21], [22], suggests that their body schema maintains a motor representation of the missing hand and that this representation can be activated by stimulating the motor cortex [23].
"You've got a hundred papers saying, 'My God, they can move their phantom' — but it stayed at that level, a descriptive level," Ramachandran said.
"This Phantom is not the phantom we knew.
