Alien hand syndrome
neuropsychiatric disorder
Alien hand syndrome (AHS) or Dr. Strangelove syndrome or Alien Limb Syndrome is a category of conditions in which a person experiences their limbs acting seemingly on their own, without conscious control over the actions. There are a variety of clinical conditions that fall under this category, most commonly affecting the left hand. There are many similar terms for the various forms of the condition, but they are often used inappropriately. The affected person may sometimes reach for objects and manipulate them without wanting to do so, even to the point of having to use the controllable hand to restrain the alien hand. The occurrence of alien hand syndrome can be usefully conceptualized as a phenomenon reflecting a functional "disentanglement" between thought and action.
Alien hand syndrome is best documented in cases where a person has had the two hemispheres of their brain surgically separated, a procedure sometimes used to relieve the symptoms of extreme cases of epilepsy and epileptic psychosis, e.g., temporal lobe epilepsy. It also occurs in some cases after brain surgery, stroke, infection, tumor, aneurysm, migraine and specific degenerative brain conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, corticobasal degeneration and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease. Other areas of the brain that are associated with alien hand syndrome are the frontal, occipital, and parietal lobes.
There are five different types of Alien Hand Syndrome.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Alien hand syndrome” as neuropsychiatric disorder. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q143790. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alien hand syndrome” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.