What is Alice’s syndrome in Wonderland

Today we’ll talk about micro- or macropsy, the so-called strange and rather rare disease in medicine - “Alice’s syndrome in Wonderland”. As a rule, it is characterized as a neurological condition in which a person's perception of reality is impaired.

A patient with micropsy sees the objects surrounding him or parts of his body disproportionately small or, conversely, huge (macropsy), losing the ability to understand their true dimensions. The temporal and spatial orientation are also fundamentally disrupted.

How Alice's Syndrome occurs in Wonderland

What exactly makes the human brain so bizarrely react 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 can be one of the manifestations of a complex form of epilepsy, a consequence of fever, mononucleosis, brain tumors, and, of course, caused by the action of psychotropic substances and drugs.

It was previously believed that such neurological changes can occur mainly as a result of damage to the brain in the parietal region.

How Alice's syndrome manifests itself in Wonderland

It should be noted that in patients with micropsy, the eyes, as a rule, are not damaged, and the culprits of bizarre “hallucinations” are only changes in the psyche, which cause 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 the sofa can become so tiny that it’s just scary to sit on it - you can crush it. Alice’s syndrome will make you carefully go around the pebble on the road - because it is the size of a mountain!

Patients described that their own fingers seemed to them a meter long, and the floor suddenly became wavy, and the legs "stuck" in it, as in soft clay. In addition, it seemed to them that the trees outside the window were nearby and each leaf could be examined in detail on them.

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 more rare and less pronounced, and eventually disappear.

How Alice Syndrome was discovered in Wonderland

The name of the syndrome was given in 1952 by Dr. Lipman, in the journal Mental Illness. There he posted an article entitled “The hallucinations inherent in migraines,” which described this syndrome in detail, linking it with the feelings of the heroine of the famous Lewis Carroll fairy tale.

If you remember, this is how strange and inexplicably Alice saw everything around herself in a wonderful world. The syndrome confuses patients by destroying the logical relationship between the size and shape of objects. There is a suspicion that the author of a wonderful fairy tale himself, a professor of mathematics at Oxford University, suffered from attacks of micropsy.

A little later, more accurately and in detail this disease was described by the Canadian psychiatrist John Todd (1955), trying to understand the causes of the appearance of this syndrome. And now microsopia in honor of him is also called Todd's syndrome.