The rubber hand is perceived as a part of your personal physique when you may’t see your personal. Credit score: PAIN Experiences (2025). DOI: 10.1097/PR9.0000000000001252
If an individual hides their very own hand and focuses on a rubber hand as a substitute, they could understand it as a part of their very own physique beneath sure circumstances. What appears like a gimmick might in the future be used to assist sufferers that suffer from persistent ache.
Researchers on the Clinic for Psychosomatic Medication and Psychotherapy on the LWL College Hospital in Bochum, Germany, have proven that ache brought on by warmth is skilled as much less extreme due to the rubber hand phantasm. They printed their findings within the journal PAIN Experiences.
Warmth creates phantasm
The rubber hand phantasm happens when the hidden hand and the rubber hand are touched on the similar time, for instance with a brush. Within the experiment outlined right here, the phantasm was not evoked via contact, however via a warmth stimulus and simultaneous illumination with crimson mild:
In step one, the researchers decided the person ache threshold for warmth ache in all 34 right-handed take a look at members. The members then positioned their left hand behind a display screen in order that they may not see it. The hand hidden by the display screen was positioned on a thermode head, a small plate that may be heated beneath managed circumstances.
As an alternative of their left hand, a rubber hand was positioned in entrance of the members, which might be illuminated with crimson mild from beneath. The take a look at members’ proper hand was positioned on a slider which they used throughout the experiment to repeatedly charge the painfulness of the warmth on their left hand.
The researchers carried out a number of take a look at runs through which they heated the thermode to a number of temperature ranges just under the respective ache threshold, precisely on the ache threshold and considerably above it. The rubber hand was concurrently illuminated with crimson mild.
“The heat stimulus on the left hand with the simultaneous red illumination of the rubber hand evoked the illusion,” explains research supervisor Professor Martin Diers, Head of the Analysis Part Scientific and Experimental Behavioral Medication. A survey of the take a look at members confirmed these findings after every collection of experiments. Within the management situation, the researchers performed the experiment with a rubber hand rotated by 180 levels.
The depth of ache decreases
“We showed that the perceived pain intensity was reduced in the rubber hand illusion condition compared to the control condition,” says Martin Diers. “We assume that the mechanism behind the rubber hand illusion is the multisensory integration of visual, tactile (here nociceptive) and proprioceptive information. The findings suggest that when people perceive the rubber hand as part of their own body, this reduces their perception of pain.”
One other issue might be the phenomenon of visible analgesia, which has additionally been proven in different research: A ache stimulus is perceived as much less intense if the individual can see the related a part of the physique whereas it’s occurring. “However, we still don’t fully understand the neural basis for this phenomenon,” says Diers.
Sooner or later, the findings might probably be used within the remedy of ache. One conceivable discipline of use could be the remedy of complicated regional ache syndrome, for instance, through which sufferers usually expertise ache and swelling within the hand.
Extra info:
Benjamin Mosch et al, Time course of the rubber hand phantasm–induced analgesia, PAIN Experiences (2025). DOI: 10.1097/PR9.0000000000001252
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Exploring the rubber hand phantasm: How visible methods might ease ache notion (2025, March 18)
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