Paul McGeoch

Paul McGeoch has a research doctorate from the University of Aberdeen, and has written over 20 papers for a variety of medical journals, as well as carrying out notable studies. His paper on The appearance of new phantom fingers post-amputation in a phocomelus, written in collaboration with V.S. Ramachandran, is listed as one of the most read papers on Neurocase.[2]

The joint research of apotemnophilia was conducted by David Brang, McGeoch and V.S. Ramachandran in 2008, with the results published in 2011. It was the first paper to theorise apotemnophiliais as a neurological disorder, caused by damage to the right parietal lobe of the brain. This rare disorder, in which a person desires the amputation of a limb, was first identified by John Money in 1977.

In 2011, Ramachandran and McGeoch carried out an experiment involving four subjects in which MEG scans showed that the right superior parietal lobe was less than fully responsive to tactile stimulation of limb areas that the subjects wished to have amputated. McGeoch and his co-researchers concluded that the images suggest "that inadequate activation of the right superior parietal lobe (SPL) leads to the unnatural situation in which the sufferers can feel the limb in question being touched without it actually incorporating into their body image, with a resulting desire for amputation". The question of which areas of the brain may be linked to syndromes such as somatopraraphrenia remains unresolved. McGeoch and Ramachandran introduced the word "xenomelia"[3] to describe this syndrome.