New Yorker on Neuroscience

One morning in January, a tall, gray-haired man whom I will call Arthur Jamieson arrived 31 the Mandler Hall psychology building, at the University of California, San Diego, in La Jolla. Jamieson is seventy years old and lives in the Midwest. He is a physician and an amateur rellist, and has been married for forty-seven years. He also suffers from a rare and bewildering condition called apotemnophilia, the compulsion to have a perfectly healthy limb amputated - in his case, the right leg, at mid-thigh. He had come to La Jolla not to be cured of his desire (like most people with the syndrome, he believed that relief would come only with the removal of the limb) but to gain insight into its cause. To that end, he had scheduled a meeting with Dr. Vilanayur S. Ramachandran, an Indian-born behavioral neurologist who is the director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at U.C.S.D., and has a reputation among his peers for being able to solve some of the most mystifying riddles of neuroscience.

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