Alice In Wonderland Research Paper

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Pages: 6

Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, also known as AIWS, is a rare neurological condition that can be summed up almost perfectly from a line in the book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Randoulph Evans and Loren Rolak mention this quote in their article saying, “The opening scene after Alice jumps down a rabbit hole and lands in a hallway where she finds a bottle which she drinks that causes her to shrink:
‘I must be shutting up like a telescope. And so it was indeed: She was now only 10 inches high…’ Later, she eats a piece of cake that makes her grow: ‘Curiouser and curiouser’ cried Alice. Now I am opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Goodbye feet! (For when she looked down at her feet they seemed to be almost out of sight they were getting so far off)’(qtd. ch.2)” (625)
This quote seems to sum up the mental and physical feeling of a person living everyday with Alice in Wonderland Syndrome.
Yuanting Lu says that Alice in Wonderland Syndrome is not caused by the malfunctioning of the eyes, but by an altered perception in the brain (par.2). According to Sherifa Hamed Alice in Wonderland Syndrome is a neurological condition that affects a person’s visual perception (par.1). It is a rare migraine variant that exhibits itself in forms
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John Todd in the “Canadian Medical Association Journal.” Though Dr. John Todd named the condition, it was first described by Dr. Lippman in his 1952 issue “Certain Hallucinations Peculiar to Migraine.” The name was derived from the book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, written by Lewis Carroll (Evans and Rolak 625). Carroll was believed to have had Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, which helped him to write the fifth chapter in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This was later believed to be untrue, at least in the fifth chapter of the book, for he did not start to shows signs of migraines and hallucinations until after the book was written (Gorriah, Favazza, and Fort-Ramirez