Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad, of NPR’s Radiolab (addictive podcast, by the way) interview neurologist V.S. Ramachandran about his ingenious and effective solution to the vexing and mysterious phenomenon of phantom limb pain. Via NPR.

The illustration to the left is the famous “sensory homunculus” described by Penrose, the representation of the body mapped onto the sensory cortex. This is, of course, the root of the problem of phantom limbs, because although the limb is gone, the representation persists, maing it hard to convince the sensory cortex otherwise. Thank heaven for Ramachandran’s tricky take on neural plasticity.