Groundbreaking Discovery: The Brain Retains a “Mental Map” of Body Parts Following Amputation

After a serious accident or the contraction of a particular disease, the only way to intervene the body of a patient is sometimes the amputation of one or more members. But if you actually lose a member, the brain does not forget it. Furthermore, he would even keep a mental card of lost members.

But the brain is a great and particularly complex muscle that we still paint to understand completely.

This phenomenon of feeling pain, discomfort or simply the limb in itself after an amputation has a name: hallucinosis. And there is nothing logical. Finally, that was what we thought before.

Indeed, a study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience August 21, 2025 simply shows that after an amputation, the brain keeps in memory the “card” of all our members. In other words, even if they are no longer there, the brain, “sees” them again.

But maybe there is a matter of time? The brain can keep the mental card of our members for a certain period and then reorganize to take into account the fact that we are missing one or more. Well not.

In view of the experiences carried out by researchers fromUniversity College Londonthe brain keeps the mental card of our members indefinitely. It therefore does not undergo reorganization and that therefore explains why, even years after an amputation, individuals can be confronted with the phenomenon of hallucinosis.

What does this change?

Lots of things! First, such a discovery makes us understand that we are surely still very far from knowing everything about our brain. Second and it is surely the most important, it could lead to a revolution in medicine.

Indeed, after an amputation, it is possible to be prescribed a prosthesis which replaces the disappeared member in place of the latter. However, these are only linked to our peripheral nervous system. In other words, we just have to contract our muscle to activate the prosthesis as explained by Laurent Bougrain and Benjamin the Gulvan in a paper published in 2016 in the journal Psychiatric evolution.

Thanks to this discovery, we could generalize the fact of developing neuroprothèses. Indeed, our brain having kept a mental card of our members, if we were to link a prosthesis connected to our brain via “A network of electrodes placed in contact with nervous tissue”Explains Inserm, we would no longer really need to learn to use said prosthesis since the brain would interpret its presence as the disappeared member.

But before this is truly effective, it will be necessary to be satisfied with conventional prostheses, even if many experiences are currently underway.

Source: franceinfo / Inserm