THE LINES OF DIALOGUE SEEMS ILLOGICAL. EXPLAIN WHY YOU THINK THIS IS SO.
from alice in the wonderland
Answers
Lewis carroll was remarkably modest about his masterpiece. “The heroine spends an hour underground, and meets various birds, beasts, etc (no fairies), endowed with speech,” he wrote in Punch. “The whole thing is a dream, but that I don’t want revealed till the end.”
It is now one-and-a-half centuries since Alice first made that journey – and Carroll’s humble tale has inspired countless films, paintings, and even a ballet. What is less well known is the way it shaped our understanding of the brain. Not just Freudian psychology and analysis, but modern neuroscience.
Memory, language, and consciousness: long before we had the technology to map the brain’s Wonderland, Carroll was already charting its contours with his playful thought experiments. “It explores so many ideas about whether there’s a continuous self, how we remember things from the past and think about the future – there’s lots of richness there about what we know about cognition and cognitive science,” says Alison Gopnik at the University of California, Berkeley.
All of us can learn something about ourselves from Alice in Wonderland – if only we look in the right way. As we approach the book’s 150th anniversary, BBC Future follows her journey to the brain’s outer limits.
“Drink me”
(Alamy)
(Alamy)
“Well, I'll eat it,” said Alice, “and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if it makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door; so either way I'll get into the garden, and I don't care which happens!”
In one of her first adventures, Alice finds a potion with “drink me” on its label, that shrinks her to just 10 inches tall. A magic cake then has the opposite effect – she is now so big her head hits the ceiling. The scenes are among the most memorable of the book and Disney’s film adaptation – and they were among the first to grab the attention of scientists.
In 1955, a psychiatrist called John Todd found that certain patients reported exactly the same feeling of “opening out like a telescope”. The disorder is known as Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, and it seems to be most common in children. “I have heard patients saying that things appear upside down, or even though mommy is on other side of the room, she appeared next to her,” says Grant Liu, a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia who has studied the phenomenon.
Carroll’s diaries show that he suffered migraines, which often trigger the syndrome – leading some to speculate that he was using his own experiences as inspiration. Liu suspects the syndrome can be pinned to abnormal activity in the parietal lobes, which are responsible for spatial awareness, skewing the sense of perspective and distance. But despite the fact that it can be disturbing, these fleeting illusions are generally harmless. “The majority are unaffected – and we just provide reassurance that the patient is not crazy and that other people also experience these things,” says Liu. Today, neuroscientists are trying to evoke the illusion in healthy subjects – which they think might shed light on the way we create our sense of self in the here and now.