PEOPLE who become paralysed after suffering a psychological trauma are not faking, say scientists in Britain. Their studies suggest that when one part of the brain wants the body to move, another part stops the message being translated into action.
Debate about the cause of trauma-induced paralysis or "hysterical conversion" has raged for over a century, but no one has come up with a conclusive explanation of the neurophysiological processes behind it. Peter Halligan at the Rivermead Rehabilitation Centre in Oxford and his colleagues studied a 45-year-old woman who is paralysed on her left side. The paralysis set in two years after a violent assault. The researchers used positron emission tomography to study blood flow in the brain while the woman tried to move her legs.
The team first asked her to prepare to move her leg, but not to start moving until they tapped it. Brain scans taken at ...
To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content.