Fifty five-year-old Karen Byrne lives in New Jersey. She had a surgery at 27 to control her epilepsy. Since then something bizarre started happening with her. Her left hand, and occasionally her left leg, behaved as if they had a mind of their own.
‘I’d light a cigarette, balance it on an ashtray, and then my left hand would reach forward and stub it out. It would take things out of my handbag and I wouldn’t realise so I would walk away. I lost a lot of things before I realised what was going on,’ she said.
Not only that, her left hand would slap her suddenly or start unbuttoning her shirt. She suffers from a strange neurological disorder called Alien Hand Syndrome.
Although a person with Alien Hand syndrome has full sensation in the rogue hand, they are not in control of its movement as though it is not part of their body.
Researchers believe that this is a side effect of brain surgery or an injury to the area of the brain which connects the two halves of the brain. They found that in patients with this syndrome, the left and right hemisphere of their brains each is capable of its own independent will.
In Karen’s case, the right side of her brain refused to be dominated by the left and so her left hand seemed to be controlled by ‘alien intelligence’. Earlier there was no cure for this disorder but a study published in the journal Neurologist revealed that botulinum toxin injections may help minimize this syndrome.
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