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I found the discussion about the phantom limb syndrome and mirror box treatment very interesting. I have seen this in the show House, MD awhile ago and thought it was interesting. Of course, I didn’t know anything about corollary discharge and wasn’t even sure if it was made up thing for the show, or well known and recognized treatment. I also thought the pain and why the treatment works is are all because of “psychological” effect. In other words, it’s all in your head (not the head with nervous system, neurons, etc, but head as “mind”). Learning about corollary discharge taught me that the problem with phantom limb syndrome is not because one “believes” something, therefore it happens even though it’s not really there, but there really is brain chemistry that explains why brain acts that way. I don’t know what I’m saying makes sense for others, but it is kind of legitimating the syndrome.

With phantom limb syndrome and mirror box treatment, corollary discharge is used to “fool” the brain to think of the hand in the mirror as real arm and because it’s working fine, it shouldn’t hurt, therefore it doesn’t hurt. In contrast, the car sickness example used corollary discharge to correctly put the vision in accordance with the movement, therefore does not feel sick in the moving car. If I understood correctly, these two examples showed how one idea can be used in opposite ways to get rid of problems. Clever!