Just on that day, it was a pretty girl.Today if you saw Ian on the street, you wouldn't be able to tell that he has this handicap. He works in California.And one day he says, a patient showed up in his office and it seems that the guy had had his arm amputated. [RADIOLAB INTRO] JAD ABUMRAD: Recently, we interviewed a guy named Steven Johnson, who wrote a book. If the lights go out accidentally ...That's called a dangerous place to be.
© 2020 KCRW All Rights Reserved. And it was a navy blue dress with white polka dots.But that, you see, when Ian walks anywhere he has to think the whole time about walking and the floor.So merely the erotic sort of charge cost you your ability to walk.Be it that sort of charge, but any distraction really took me away from my focus, which is where is my left foot in relation to my right foot?
No.Baked potatoes last week. But we began to realize at Luke that in the eight weeks of training period that I was there, we lost nine pilots.And most of them for running into the ground or running into each other in the air and that sort of thing. I don't know that I was on a magic carpet, but I sure wasn't having to walk.
He said, "No, no, not the mirror.
He tried, his brain would issue the commands.His brain was saying, "Move the arm," but he was getting visual feedback, and indeed feedback from his muscles saying, "Nope." It's just something we do.So I said to Damasio, you know, the critics called James wrong because he people who were paralyzed couldn't feel anything. And I was at the shop where I worked and felt tired and lethargic. It's as though Ian were two people: a puppeteer and a puppet. Did the phantom fingers eventually dissolve?No, we still haven't been able to devise a technique to get them. And in the last three days, you remember the excruciating elbow pain and wrist pain I got several times a day? And that's an awful lot of pilots to lose just in training.Okay, fast forward many years. What is wrong with Ian?Ian at the time he had his illness had lost a class of peripheral nerve cells to do with sensation. He would have days where his phantom arm would seize up in pain. "Pilots are generally not New Age kind of guys, but at least 40 of them in Whinnery's study did report what he just described: having an out-of-body experience. ]Goddamn, I can't get the -- I think that was enough. So I pressed the button. God, this room doesn't get any bigger, does it? You don't even know what germs are yet. What's the -- what do you call it?Oh, I thought it was going to be one of those cultural moments where you guys call it something else.No, not quite. So what do we know about phantom limbs? How would you do that? There's a lot of confusion, deception even. That's what -- that's what we all do. It's more basic than that. And this incidence occurred in July of 1952 at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona.Our story begins on a normal training day. Take your good arm, make it stiff, curl your hand into a fist, dig your fingernails into your palm deeply, make it hurt. In other words, phantom limbs are like real limbs. There are other people who ...My work is just as important as your work and you've now screwed it up.How did I screw it up? So the critics said William James is wrong, dead wrong.
Information can move through the brain in different ways at the same time. I still feel it move." And the strings of Ian's puppet interestingly are his eyes.Because he doesn't have this feedback information coming from his limbs back to his brain ...... because that's missing, unless he looks directly at the limb he wants to move he can't move it.If I look away from my hand, I lose all connection with it.Well, what happens if -- if it's dark or if the lights are out?Well, you know, it's -- he can't afford darkness. And at the foot of the table must have been a doctor sawing away.A circular amputation involved cutting straight through the skin to the bone. They're grunting and groaning and making all these hook noises.Just to give you a sense of what that might feel like, for a pilot like Tim Sestak who weighs about 200 pounds, once he makes a 12.4 G turn his body goes from 200 pounds ...... to almost 2,500 pounds. This is Mission Control. Got to the shed and pulled the motor mower out.Pulled the what out? And then laying there in frustration, I just thought the whole process through, and I broke it down into quite simple small movements. It's your wife.I can't believe you're still there.