Today we will talk about micro or macropsia, as they call a strange and rather rare disease in medicine - "Alice in Wonderland syndrome". It is generally characterized as a neurological condition in which a person's perception of reality is impaired.
A patient with micropsia sees the surrounding objects or parts of his body disproportionately small or, conversely, huge (macropsia), losing the ability to understand their true dimensions. The temporal and spatial orientation is also radically violated.
How Alice in Wonderland syndrome occurs
What exactly makes the human brain react so bizarrely to visual images is still not clear. The appearance of the syndrome is associated with a hereditary predisposition to migraines. It is also believed that this disease may be one of the manifestations of a complex form of epilepsy, a consequence of fever, mononucleosis, tumorsbrain, and, of course, caused by the action of psychotropic substances and drugs.
It was previously thought that such neurological changes could occur mainly as a result of damage to the brain in the parietal region.
How Alice in Wonderland Syndrome Manifests
It should be noted that in patients with micropsia, the eyes, as a rule, are not damaged, and the culprits of bizarre "hallucinations" are only changes in the psyche, forcing visual, auditory, and even tactile images to be perceived distorted. So, for example, an ordinary spoon can suddenly grow to the size of a shovel, and a sofa can become so tiny that it’s just scary to sit on it - you can crush it. Alice's syndrome will force you to diligently bypass a pebble on the road - after all, it is the size of a mountain!
The patients described that their own fingers seemed to them a meter long, and the floor suddenly became wavy, and the legs "got bogged down" in it, as in soft clay. In addition, it seemed to them that the trees outside the window were nearby and that each leaf could be examined in detail.
Such attacks last for several minutes, and sometimes weeks, causing a panic state. Fortunately, like the fabulous Alice, patients return to the real world, as their seizures gradually become rarer and less pronounced, and eventually disappear altogether.
How the Alice in Wonderland syndrome was discovered
The name of the syndrome was given in 1952 by Dr. Lipman, in the journal "On mentaldiseases." There he published the article "Hallucinations inherent in migraine", in which he described this syndrome in detail, linking it with the sensations of the heroine of the famous fairy tale by Lewis Carroll.
If you remember, it was just so strange and inexplicable that Alice saw everything around her in a wonderful world. The syndrome confuses patients, destroying the logical relationship between the size and shape of objects. There is a suspicion that the author of a wonderful fairy tale, a professor of mathematics at Oxford University, suffered from bouts of micropsia.
A little later, the Canadian psychiatrist John Todd (1955) described this disease more accurately and in detail, trying to understand the causes of this syndrome. And now micropsia is also called Todd's syndrome after him.
