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 ob servations of sensory referral to phantom limbs of amputees. The referred s omatic sensations are elicited by touch but not usually by other kinds of s timuli, cannot be localized precisely, and do not support spatially organiz ed perception. These characteristics suggest that referral may depend on re organization in parietal cortical areas other than area 3b, the primary cor tical recipient of cutaneous sensory inputs.