Alice in Wonderland Syndrome is a rare neurological condition that distorts a person’s perception of size, shape, and space, making familiar environments or body parts appear strangely altered. It presents in young children, who outgrow the strange phenomena in their teenage years. Researchers believe it arises from disruptions in the brain’s visual and spatial processing regions, often linked to migraines, infections, or seizures. Though fleeting and in most cases harmless episodes, it is revealed how delicately the brain constructs our sense of reality.

 The name was coined for the similarities in the descriptions of symptoms to Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in which a young Alice experiences dramatic shifts in size and perception after eating or drinking mysterious substances, not to mention observations of smiling cats, smoking caterpillars, and tardy white rabbits. Neurologists adopted the term in the 1950s to describe similar real-life perceptual distortions that mirror Alice’s fantastical experiences.  You can read the full Scientific American article written by Allison Parshall here.