Breakthrough Investigation Of People With A Sixth Finger Has Implications For Infant Medicine And Cyborgs

The anatomy of the right hand of one of the polydactyl volunteers, via Mehring et al, 2019 By Christian Jarrett Picture in your mind a futuristic, technologically enhanced human. Perhaps you imagined them with a subcutaneous device in their arm for phone calls and browsing the internet. Maybe they are wearing smart glasses for augmented reality. What I’d wager you didn’t think of is the presence of an artificial sixth digit attached to each hand. However, a breakthrough open-access study in Nature Communications – the first to study the physiology and sensorimotor mechanics of polydactyly volunteers (people born with extra fingers) – shows the feasibility and practical advantages that would be gained from such an extra appendage. The results also have implications for the medical treatment of polydactyl people, who often have their extra finger removed at birth on the presumption that it will be of no benefit to them. Carsten Mehring and his colleagues conducted various tests with two polydactyly volunteers, a 17-year-old boy and his mother, both born with an extra fully formed finger between their thumb and index finger (known as preaxial polydactyly). The researchers note that polydactyly is “not rare”, with an incidence of around 0.2 per cent in the population. However, fully formed preaxial polydactyly is a rarer subset of that group. Using MRI of the volunteers’ hands, the researchers established that the extra finger has a saddle joint...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Brain Technology Source Type: blogs