Intermanual referral of sensation to anesthetic hands

This report describes a study of patients with hands rendered anesthetic by stroke or neurosurgery. Touching the normal hand of such patients triggers sensations referred contralaterally to the anesthetic hand, paralleling observations of sensory referral to phantom limbs of amputees. The referred somatic sensations are elicited by touch but not usually by other kinds of stimuli, cannot be localized precisely, and do not support spatially organized perception. These characteristics suggest that referral may depend on reorganization in parietal cortical areas other than area 3b, the primary cortical recipient of cutaneous sensory inputs.