The Facts on Alien Hand Syndrome
Imagine waking up one morning from a deep sleep, your eyes are barely open when you’re smacked straight across your face by an unknown assailant.
As the stinging dissipates you look around, shocked, holding your reddened face. Out of the corner of your eye, you see a hand coming in for another smack. Quickly you grab it, stopping it from smacking you again. As you follow the hand to the arm it belongs to, you realize it’s your own damn hand.
Fucking traitor
Wild dream? Nope, let’s go back in history…
The year is 1908, a woman enters the office of German Neurologist Kurt Goldstein. She tells him of an interesting dilemma she’s been dealing with. According to her, her hand has been possessed by an evil spirit, hell-bent on killing her. In fact, she’s woken up recently to the hand attempting to strangle her.
Now Doctor Goldstein was a man of science, he pioneered a holistic approach to brain trauma and would later focus on rehabilitation for veterans, specifically those who were suffering from war trauma, instead of tossing them in asylums and penitentiaries.
So Goldstein wasn’t keen on the idea of an evil spirit.
He believed the problem was stemming from some damage to her brain. Of course, he couldn’t just study her brain while she was alive, he would have to wait for that.
Dr. Goldstein: “I'ma need that brain.”
But for the time being, he ran test after test, finding no issues psychologically and her past medical history wasn’t especially extraordinary, only a stroke she had suffered years before, from which she seemed to recover fully. Yet he himself would witness her hand moving on its own accord. Having no other patients he could study, Goldstein was stumped.
It would take another few decades and a string of similar cases before someone else was able to put the pieces together.
During the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th-century epilepsy was wildly misunderstood, to the point where sufferers were put into asylums, and states, like Connecticut, were making laws prohibiting anyone with epilepsy from marrying.
Really Connecticut?
As the years went on, more and more advancements in medicine took away that stigma especially when the “Electroencephalography machine” or EEG machine was introduced.
In the 1940s a treatment, with no apparent dangerous side effects was introduced, called a Corpus Callosotomy. There’s also the fact that it’s brain surgery so that might be a hindrance for some.
Your brain has two hemispheres, think of these hemispheres as two equally large independent cities with a bridge in-between. Each day workers walk along the bridge between cities carrying vital pieces of information that help the cities better function as a whole.
The bridge is your corpus callosum.
If you suffer from epilepsy, especially experiencing more violent seizures, at random intervals those workers don’t just walk, they run across the bridge. Joined by a mass number of others, all across the bridge and through the cities.
A corpus callosotomy demolishes that bridge by severing the corpus callosum. This doesn’t cure epilepsy but helps diminish the severity of seizures. In some cases, those patients that went through the procedure in the 1940s and 50s began experiencing a hand with a mind of its own, in some cases even a leg.
Some of these patients were then put through tests by Neuropsychologist Roger Sperry who made great leaps in the research of split-brain patients, eventually earning him a Nobel Prize. So he was kind of the right man for the job.
These patients reported feeling as if one of their hands wasn’t their own and would do things without reason or want. Through prior tests with patients who had a corpus callosotomy, Sperry knew the separating of the hemispheres caused some issues with information processing in the brain, with these patients Sperry put them through slightly different tests.
For example, a test would start by showing two objects to a patient, an egg cup and a golf ball. Both were then placed in a bag with various other items and the patient was asked to reach in and find the eggshell with only their dominant hand.
Instead what would occur is the dominant hand and the hand with a mind of its own, would both reach in pulling out the egg cup and golf ball respectively. When the patient was asked why the other hand pulled out the golf ball, the patient would respond with “I don’t know.”
“The fuck you mean there’s a beer in my hand."“
It was clear to Sperry that in rare cases a corpus callosotomy would cause Alien Hand Syndrome, a term he went on to coin.
Yet corpus callosotomies weren’t the only cause, Goldstien’s patient from 1908 didn’t have brain surgery. But she did have a stroke. It turns out strokes, tumors, aneurysms, degenerative brain conditions, and even trauma to the head can cause Alien Hand Syndrome. Although it is rare, with less than a hundred cases reported.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a cure for Alien Hand Syndrome but the good news is, that alien hands aren’t always murderous traitors. Some have learned to live with it, even giving the hand a name or giving it a gender. Others experiencing it say the hand will act as a deterrent to bad habits.
In one case as the patient is attempting to light their cigarette the alien hand will snatch the cigarette and throw it to the ground. In other cases, the alien hand may just grab random things, toss them around, and just be an overall nuisance. This is starting to sound like a toddler. Or just my nephew when he was one.
Another piece of good news, those who begin suffering from alien hand syndrome because of some brain trauma may regain control of their hand over time as the brain heals. So if you’re suffering from it, hang tight … just not with the alien hand, it might let go.
“…shit…”
