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What would happen if the sense of the body (vision, balance of organs and proprioception) failed? For most people, the movement of body parts is unconscious. However, there have been case studies of patients suffering from a malfunction of their sixth sense. The sixth sense is our awareness of our own bodies through the sensory flow from muscles, tendons and joints. When the body is not able to sense itself, it must compensate through the remaining senses of the body. One of Dr. Oliver Sack's case studies, "The Disembodied Lady," described a patient who claimed a need to consciously control the movement of her hands. "The wandering of her hands....as if she were receiving no information from the periphery, as if the control loops for tone and movement had catastrophically broken down." Amazingly, after about a year of therapy the patient learned to operate her bodily movements using an enhanced sense of vision.

My favorite of Dr. Sack's case studies in "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" has been the role of the nervous system in body sense. After reading the chapters on phantom limbs I wondered if there is a neurological explanation for these behaviors. Are these losses random manifestations of the brain?