Alice in Wonderland Syndrome

 

 

Migraine and epilepsy (Wiki Carro)

In his diary for the year 1880 Dodgson recorded experiencing his first episode of migraine with aura, describing very accurately the process of 'moving fortifications' that are a manifestation of the aura stage of the syndrome[29]. Several people have suggested the odd experiences Alice undergoes in the stories may have been inspired by migraine-like symptoms.[citation needed] Indeed a condition, Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, has been named after it. Also known as micropsia and macropsia, it is a brain condition affecting the way objects are perceived by the mind. For example, an afflicted person may look at a larger object, like a basketball, and perceive it as if it were the size of a mouse.

Dodgson also suffered two attacks in which he lost consciousness. He was diagnosed by three different doctors; a Dr. Morshead, Dr. Brooks, and Dr. Stedman, believed the attack and a consequent attack to be an "epileptiform" seizure (initially thought to be fainting, but Brooks changed his mind). Some have concluded from this he was a lifetime sufferer from this condition, but there is no evidence of this in his diaries beyond the diagnosis of the two attacks already mentioned. [30]. Some authors, in particular Sadi Ranson, have suggested Carroll may have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy in which consciousness is not always completely lost, but altered, and in which the symptoms mimic many of the same experiences as Alice in Wonderland. Note that Carroll had at least one incidence in which he suffered full loss of consciousness and awoke with a bloody nose, which he recorded in his diary and noted that the episode left him not feeling himself for "quite sometime afterward". This attack was diagnosed as possibly "epileptiform" and Carroll himself later wrote of his "seizures" in the same diary. It's worth noting that epilepsy runs in families, and Carroll had at least one other family member with epilepsy (also recorded in his diaries), and that speech hesitations, facial asymmetry, as well as some deafness are not uncommon in certain epilepsies. It is also recorded that several of Dodgson's siblings suffered from a speech hesitation, suggesting again that any existing neurological condition was within the family as reported in Interviews & Recollections, editor Morton N. Cohen.

0.^ "The Diaries of Lewis Carroll", vol 9 p. 52

 

 

Going Underground/ What about lewis carroll

Sadi Ranson-Pollizotti

Who else but Carroll could carry on a successful mathematics career, penning many books under his Christian name (Dodgson), serve as a tutor at Oxford, be the author of the Alice books, and one of the most important photographers of both his and our time, with photographs that are still widely exhibited and highly valued (not to mention controversial) to this day. When writing about Carroll, even though we are writing about one man, he is a man who lived many lives, all of them at the same time. Some biographers have labeled him ‘schizophrenic’, others ‘multiple personality disorder,’ and many more diagnoses, yet none seem to fit and none, for the record, were ever diagnosed during his day. It seems many biographers have had a difficult time reconciling the many parts of Dodgson’s personality, and, unable to reconcile them, they simple create a split and hence, the misdiagnoses (mis-diagnonsense?). It may sound good; it may explain how he could be so different as Carroll the writer and

Dodgson the Deacon, but this doesn’t make it the truth.

The answer to Dodgson’s personality quirks is likely to be found in the one condition he was very clearly diagnosed with during his lifetime; temporal lobe epilepsy, an interesting fact for myriad reasons, but especially for the fact that epilepsy has a proven link to creativity and artistic expression as well as religious fervor and hypergraphia. One wonders why biographers have given it such little ink when it could be the very key to understanding not only Wonderland, but also Dodgson’s personality; he fits the epileptic personality – a very particular group of personality traits known as Geschwind’s syndrome-all of which would encompass his moral and religious beliefs, love of organization, love of music boxes and clocks, and his hypergraphia. That Dodgson also had a fascination with epilepsy should tell biographers something; that much of his written work is focused on ‘fits’, altered states of consciousness, and other such ‘eerie states’ or what he coined, ‘the waking dream’, are all clues to his inner-mechanism. To say he was simply epileptic would be too reductionist; but to not factor it into the equation at all (and it does not get its due in really any biography to date), is clearly a huge oversight. 

Dodgson doesn’t tell us how to interpret his work, his life – he just leaves it there for us, nicely organized like the library he oversaw at Oxford (he was sub-librarian at Christ Church for many years, the windows of which overlooked the Deanery garden, from where he likely caught his first glimpse of the Liddell sisters and young Alice). It is all there for us to peruse at our leisure. The work he has left behind, his famous nonsense, the Alice books, The Hunting of the Snark, remain the post popular, despite the fact that Dodgson was a mathematician by trade and penned many books under his own name, it is the nonsense of his life that interests us most, a curious fact.

 

 

Neurophilosophy

Diagnosing Dostoyevsky’s Epilepsy

http://neurophilosophy.wordpress.com/2007/04/16/diagnosing-dostoyevskys-epilepsy/

 

An early attempt at diagnosing Dostoyevsky’s condition was made by Sigmund Freud, who trained as a neurologist, and described epilepsy as “an organic brain disease independent of the psychic constitution”. Freud believed that the condition was incompatible with great intellect, because it was “associated with deterioration and retrogression of the mental performance”; “What is generally believed to be epilepsy in men of genius,” Freud wrote, “are always straight cases of hysteria”. And this is exactly how the psychoanalyst interpreted Dostoyevsky’s epilepsy. In an essay entitled Dostoyevsky and Parricide, which was first published in 1928, Freud suggested that the onset of the Dostoyevsky’s epilepsy is intimately connected to the death of his father:

Dostoyevsky called himself an epileptic…it is highly probable that this so-called epilepsy was only a symptom of his neurosis and must accordingly be classified as hystero-epilepsy - that is, as severe hysteria. The most probable assumption is that the attacks went back far into his childhood, that their place was taken to begin with by milder symptoms and that they did not assume an epileptic form until after the shattering experience of his eighteenth year - the murder of his father.

 

In the following passage, Strakhov relates Dostoevsky’s own description of the aura:

Fyodor Mikhailovich often told me that before the onset of an attack there were minutes in which he was in rapture. “For several moments,” he said, “I would experience such joy as would be inconceivable in ordinary life - such joy that no one else could have any notion of. I would feel the most complete harmony in myself and in the whole world and this feeling was so strong and sweet that for a few seconds of such bliss I would give ten or more years of my life, even my whole life perhaps.”

 

 

 

In this passage, Dostoyevsky gives a vivid account of the ecstatic aura preceding one of Myshkin’s seizures:

 

He was thinking, incidentally, that there was a moment or two in his epileptic condition almost before the fit itself (if it occurred in waking hours) when suddenly amid the sadness, spiritual darkness and depression, his brain seemed to catch fire at brief moments…His sensation of being alive and his awareness increased tenfold at those moments which flashed by like lightning. His mind and heart were flooded by a dazzling light. All his agitation, doubts and worries, seemed composed in a twinkling, culminating in a great calm, full of understanding…but these moments, these glimmerings were still but a premonition of that final second (never more than a second) with which the seizure itself began. That second was, of course, unbearable.

This very famous account of an ecstatic aura has helped neurologists to localise the origins of Myshkin’s, and hence Dostoyevsky’s, epileptic seizures. The emotional content of the aura suggests that this type of seizure was caused by abnormal electrical activity in parts of the temporal lobe; the emotions are associated with activity in structures of the limbic system - specifically, the hippocampus, amygdala and neocortex of the temporal lobe. The Idiot was written in 1867-68, when Dostoyevsky was having emotional and financial difficulties. With his wife, he set off for Europe, travelling from one city to the next, to avoid his creditors and to seek treatment for his epilepsy. This was a period during which Dostoyevsky experienced a number of severe seizures, perhaps as a result of the psychological burden of his circumstances.

 

 

 

Temporal Lobe Epilepsy

History

http://www.emedicine.com/NEURO/topic365.htm

 

Aura

Auras occur in approximately 80% of temporal lobe seizures. They are a common feature of simple partial seizures and usually precede complex partial seizures of temporal lobe origin.

Auras may be classified by symptom type; the types comprise somatosensory, special sensory, autonomic, or psychic symptoms.

Somatosensory and special sensory phenomena

Olfactory and gustatory illusions and hallucinations may occur. Acharya et al found that olfactory auras are associated more commonly with temporal lobe tumors than with other causes of TLE.

Auditory hallucinations consist of a buzzing sound, a voice or voices, or muffling of ambient sounds. This type of aura is more common with neocortical TLE than with other types of TLE.

Patients may report distortions of shape, size, and distance of objects.

These visual illusions are unlike the visual hallucinations associated with occipital lobe seizure in that no formed elementary visual image is noted, such as the visual image of a face that may be seen with seizures arising from the fusiform or the inferior temporal gyrus.

Things may appear shrunken (micropsia) or larger (macropsia) than usual.

Tilting of structures has been reported. Vertigo has been described with seizures in the posterior superior temporal gyrus.

0.Psychic phenomena

Patients may have a feeling of déjà vu or jamais vu, a sense of familiarity or unfamiliarity, respectively.

Patients may experience depersonalization (ie, feeling of detachment from oneself) or derealization (ie, surroundings appear unreal).

Fear or anxiety usually is associated with seizures arising from the amygdala. Sometimes, the fear is strong, described as an "impending sense of doom."

Patients may describe a sense of dissociation or autoscopy, in which they report seeing their own body from outside.

Autonomic phenomena are characterized by changes in heart rate, piloerection, and sweating. Patients may experience an epigastric "rising" sensation or nausea.

What is it like?

http://www.epilepsy.com/epilepsy/epilepsy_temporallobe

Here's a typical story: "I get the strangest feeling—most of it can't be put into words. The whole world suddenly seems more real at first. It's as though everything becomes crystal clear. Then I feel as if I'm here but not here, kind of like being in a dream. It's as if I've lived through this exact moment many times before. I hear what people say, but they don't make sense. I know not to talk during the episode, since I just say foolish things. Sometimes I think I'm talking but later people tell me that I didn't say anything. The whole thing lasts a minute or two."

 

Dostoyevsky, the 19th-century Russian novelist, who himself had epilepsy, gave vivid accounts of apparent temporal lobe seizures in his novel The Idiot:

He remembered that during his epileptic fits, or rather immediately preceding them, he had always experienced a moment or two when his whole heart, and mind, and body seemed to wake up with vigor and light; when he became filled with joy and hope, and all his anxieties seemed to be swept away for ever; these moments were but presentiments, as it were, of the one final second…in which the fit came upon him. That second, of course, was inexpressible.

Next moment something appeared to burst open before him: a wonderful inner light illuminated his soul. This lasted perhaps half a second, yet he distinctly remembered hearing the beginning of a wail, the strange, dreadful wail, which burst from his lips of its own accord, and which no effort of will on his part could suppress. Next moment he was absolutely unconscious; black darkness blotted out everything. He had fallen in an epileptic fit.

hree-quarters of people with TLE also have simple partial seizures, in which they remain fully conscious. Some people have only simple partial seizures and never have a change in consciousness.

Unfortunately, in about 60% of people with TLE, the seizures spread from the temporal lobe to a wider portion of the brain. This process is called secondary generalization. The result is a convulsive (grand mal) seizure.

After the complex partial seizure or secondarily generalized seizure has ended, patents are often confused for several minutes and then gradually recover.

Temporal lobe seizures usually begin in the deeper portions of the brain's temporal lobe. This area is part of the limbic system, which controls emotions and memory. Some individuals with temporal lobe epilepsy may have problems with memory, especially if seizures have occurred for more than 5 years, but these memory problems are almost never severe.