"One experience that I've been especially interested in is our understanding and experience of pictures. If I show you a picture from a newspaper—for example, a photo of Hillary Clinton—there is a sense in which, when you look at that picture, you see Hillary. There she is, in the picture. Of course, Hillary is not there, so there is an obvious sense in which you don't see Hillary when you look at the picture. There is a sense in which you see her; and a sense in which you don't. She shows up for you, in the picture, even though she is not there. She shows up as not there. Getting clear about this phenomenon is the central empirical and conceptual problem about depiction."[...]
"[...] the use of mirrors to create sensory feedback could provide a therapy for phantom-limb pain. What Ramachandran and others have done is allow somebody who experiences phantom-limb discomfort to look at a mirror and move his good arm but get visual feedback as if he is moving the bad arm. They find that through moving the good arm it's possible to work out a cramp in what is in fact an absent arm. [...]"
—Alva Noë,
Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley
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"[...] But why would the `nalls digging' sensation also disappear along with the spasm? This is even more difficult to explain but one might suppose that the two sensations, nalls digging' and the`clenching', are linked in the brain, even in normal individuals, by a Hebbian learning mechanism so that abolishing one leads to the elimination of the other as well. What we are dealing with here, then, might be a primitive form of sensory learning that could conceivably provide a new way of experimentally approaching morc complex forms of memory and learning in the adult brain.[...]"
— V. S. Ramachandran and D. Rogers-Ramachandran
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