Waking up the alien hand: rubber hand illusion interacts with alien hand syndrome

It has been shown that combinations of visual, tactile, and proprioceptive manipulations in healthy subjects may elicit illusory feelings of embodiment (the rubber hand illusion and the somatic rubber hand illusion). We report a case of alien hand syndrome in which the alien hand interacted with the somatic rubber hand illusion to provoke a very strong movement of the alien hand. This effect could be reliably replicated at every application of the experimental procedure. Thus, the illusion seemed to wake up the alien hand. The results demonstrate that the alien hand syndrome can be affected by experimentally induced bodily illusions, which are based on the manipulation of touch and proprioceptive information.