GC: n
S: ELSEVIER – http://www.elsevier.es/ficheros/publicaciones/02134853/addon/S0213485310002306/S300/en/295v26n03a90001695pdf001_2.pdf (last access: 4 November 2016); https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25160537 (last access: 9 November 2016); NbN p. 414.
N: 1. Micropsia comes from the greek mikros which means ‘small’ and opsis, which means ‘sight’.
2. A decrease in the apparent size of objects as a result of disease of the retina or a functional disorder.
3. The term micropsia is commonly referred to as ‘Alice in Wonderland syndrome’, abreviated as ‘AWS’. However, the syndrome does not include only micropsia, but also macropsia, pelopsia and teleopsia, so it is important to make this slight difference when the term is used.
4. Micropsia is the most common of visual distortions and has the largest variety of etiologies: psichogenic micropsia (psychiatry); retinal micropsia (ophtalmology); cerebral micropsia (neurology).
5. It is important to point out that ‘micropsia’ is not the same as ‘macropsia’. Macropsia is much less frequently described than micropsia. This pathology consists of the illusion that ojects are larger than in reality.
6. Cultural interrelation:
- The syndrome’s name is commonly attributed to English psychiatrist John Todd, who in 1955 described his adult patients’ illusions of corporal and objective distortions in a paper in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. He named the collection of symptoms after Lewis Carroll’s protagonist Alice in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, who went down a rabbit hole and found herself shrinking or expanding depending on her circumstances.
- The symptom of micropsia has also been correlated by John Todd, to Jonathan Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels , based on the small people that populated the island of Lilliput in the novel, which is why this syndrome is also referred to as Lilliputian Hallucination.
S: 1. TFD – http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/micropsia – Mosby’s Medical Dictionary, 9th edition. © 2009, Elsevier. (last access: 4 November 2016). 2. TERMIUM PLUS – https://goo.gl/aIvzzw (last access: 4 November 2016). 3. TheAtlantic – https://goo.gl/saONn0 (last access: 4 November 2016). 4 to 5. Nancy J. Newman, Neil R. Miller, Valérie Biousse – 2008 – Medical – https://goo.gl/CzaQWb (last access: 4 November 2016). 6. TheAtlantic – https://goo.gl/saONn0 (last access: 4 November 2016); http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1360-0443.1968.tb05277.x/abstract (last access: 9 November 2016).
SYN: micropia, lilliputian hallucination,
S: TERMIUM PLUS – https://goo.gl/aIvzzw (last access: 4 November 2016)
