“Twas brilig, and the slithy toves/ Did gyre and gimble in the wabe…” the poem begins. It begins in the first chapter, when Alice reads a poem called the Jabberwocky. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost."Īlice’s adventures Through the Looking Glass continue these explorations – including some playful forays into the nature of speech. "Of course it must," Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh: "MY name means the shape I am – and a good handsome shape it is, too. "MUST a name mean something?" Alice asked doubtfully. "It's a stupid enough name!" Humpty Dumpty interrupted impatiently. When cross-referencing a memory about a pig with an event about a baby, for instance, both become merged in the dreamscape to surreal effect. Neuroscientists think that the phenomenon arises from the way the sleeping brain consolidates memories as it cements the recollections, it draws links between different events to build the bigger story of our lives. Elsewhere, Alice plays croquet with flamingos as clubs, and meets the smiling Cheshire cat, whose grin remains even as his body disappears.ĭreams often contain objects morphing into new identities, and this characteristic is one of the cleverest ways that Alice’s adventures evoke the sleeping mind – along with her strange sense that time is playing tricks on her. Before she knows it, the baby has turned into a pig. As Alice holds it in her hands, the baby’s nose becomes more upturned its eyes grow closer together, and it starts grunting. Wonderland is full of shapeshifting characters, including the grotesque Duchess and her crying baby. This time there could be no mistake about it: it was neither more nor less than a pig, and she felt that it would be quite absurd for her to carry it further. 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. “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. But despite the fact that it can be disturbing, these fleeting illusions are generally harmless. 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. “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.Ĭarroll’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. The disorder is known as Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, and it seems to be most common in children. In 1955, a psychiatrist called John Todd found that certain patients reported exactly the same feeling of “opening out like a telescope”. 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. A magic cake then has the opposite effect – she is now so big her head hits the ceiling. In one of her first adventures, Alice finds a potion with “drink me” on its label, that shrinks her to just 10 inches tall. “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!” As we approach the book’s 150th anniversary, BBC Future follows her journey to the brain’s outer limits. “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.Īll of us can learn something about ourselves from Alice in Wonderland – if only we look in the right way. 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. Not just Freudian psychology and analysis, but modern neuroscience. What is less well known is the way it shaped our understanding of the brain. 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. “The whole thing is a dream, but that I don’t want revealed till the end.” “The heroine spends an hour underground, and meets various birds, beasts, etc (no fairies), endowed with speech,” he wrote in Punch. Lewis Carroll was remarkably modest about his masterpiece.
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