Psychologists and neurologists have recently become fascinated by the human predilection for storytelling. Why does our brain seem to be wired to enjoy stories? And how do the emotional and cognitive effects of a narrative influence our beliefs and real-world decisions? The characteristics of neurological disorders and our natural affinity towards them, reveal clues about the narrative’s power to influence beliefs and the roots of emotion and empathy in the mind.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) brings to life Lewis Carroll’s imagination, inspired by mathematics and neurobiology. In Wonderland, Alice struggles to keep her size and proportions straight but finds that the bizarre world around her prevents her from doing either very easily. Researchers often cite Alice’s growing and shrinking as support for the idea that the novel is saturated with symbolism.
“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice, (she was so surprised that she quite forgot how to speak good English,) “now I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Goodbye, feet!” (for when she looked down at her feet, they seemed almost out of sight, they were getting so far off,) “oh, my poor little feet, I wonder who will put on your shoes and stockings for you now, dears? I’m sure I can’t! I shall be a great deal too far off to bother myself about you: you must manage the best way you can—but I must be kind to them,” thought Alice, “or perhaps they won’t walk the way I want to go! Let me see: I’ll give them a new pair of boots every Christmas.”
~ Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Over the past century and a half since the original publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland a number of scientists, doctors, and literary critics have speculated as to what real-world dispositions inspired the illusions found in Carroll’s renowned work of fiction. Carroll’s compelling story is rife with neurological disorders and derangement. Historical evidence and conjecture paint Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as less of a mere children’s tale and more of a symbolic depiction of the author’s views on novel algebraic concepts and his mental milieu. One interesting suggestion to the inspiration behind Alice’s potion-induced shrinking and growing is that Carroll may have experienced physical sensations of bodily distortion, possibly stemming from migraine-induced hallucination.
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A rare form of migraine, Alice in Wonderland Syndrome causes people to see their own bodies or those of others askew. It typically occurs without the onset of a headache, but is usually associated with a personal or familial history of migraines. It can impact one’s vision, hearing and sense of time, causing it to seem either accelerated or slowed down.
English psychiatrist John Todd, who coined the syndrome’s name in Canadian Medical Association Journal in 1955, compared the visions to those in “the parabolic mirrors of a fun-fair.” He wrote that his patients reported perceiving the body as either too big or too small and that the world seemed unreal. Treating an episode of Alice in Wonderland syndrome may be like trying to catch a harried rabbit, but medications used to prevent migraines may provide help for those with frequent episodes.
Todd and other scholars speculated that Carroll suffered from visual aura migraine symptoms that may have inspired some of the author’s fanciful narratives. Carroll’s diary entries reveal that he consulted an oculist in the years before writing Wonderland, and that later, after the publication of the Alice series, he explicitly experienced migraine hallucinations. This fact “arouses the suspicion that Alice trod the paths and byways of a Wonderland well known to her creator,” as Todd so eloquently stated. Carroll represents a fascinating case of a neurological condition in a talented individual, who was then able to use his experiences to give deeper meaning and poignancy to his art.
Carroll is not the only writer who has been documented as having a neurological condition. A score of eminent authors and artists, including Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) and Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), likely had hypergraphia (an overwhelming urge to paint or write) and other symptoms of mania and temporal lobe epilepsy.
The complexity of the human mind leaves it vulnerable to a number of neurological disorders and illusions that alter the perception of the world such that it doesn’t accurately reflect reality. While this can be distressing and debilitating to the person who is afflicted, such alterations can serve as excellent inspiration for speculative fiction. What sets speculative fiction apart from most other fiction genres is that it often depicts what we would normally consider a delusion as an accurate depiction of reality.
Individuals who suffer from Capgras syndrome believe that one or more of their loved ones has been replaced by an identical-looking impostor. Whereas in the related Fregoli syndrome, it is perceived that different people are in fact a single individual changing shape. Examples of this include John W. Campbell’s shape-shifting alien in the novella “Who Goes There?” (1938); the alien pods in Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers (1955); and the robotic housewives in Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives (1975).
Yet another peculiarity of the human psyche is inattentional blindness, a phenomenon in which an observer doesn’t perceive individuals or objects that are in plain sight. This principle was applied by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where it was used to disguise large spaceships from people whose predisposition was to only see what they were expecting to see. In a more serious vein, inattentional blindness also plays a major role in Peter Watts’ science fiction novel Blindsight—as do several other neurological disorders.
Not too surprisingly, some of the stories I’ve mentioned have a strong element of horror to them. While it’s frightening to think that our own brains might malfunction in such a way that we begin to perceive impostors all around us, I think it is even worse to consider that such illusory dispositions actually exist. Neurological disorders make for riveting storytelling and there are many perversities of the human mind that have yet to be demonstrated in fiction.
Works Cited
- “The Neurology of Alice” by Andrew Larner (Larner AJ. ACNR 4(6):35-36 (2005)). [Link via Mind Hacks]
- Todd J. “The Syndrome of Alice in Wonderland” Can Med Assoc J. 73(9):701-704 (1955)
- Rolak LA. “Literary neurologic syndromes. Alice in Wonderland.” Arch Neurol. 48(6):649-61 (1991) [subscription required]
- Larner AJ “Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty: an early report of prosopagnosia?” J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry 2004:75; doi:10.1136/jnnp.2003.027599 [subscription required]
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