After tumbling down a rabbit hole in pursuit of a curious besuited rabbit, Lewis Carroll’s Alice finds her onward journey barred by a very tiny door. Although she can peer through it, the passage behind is far too narrow for her to squeeze through. At that moment, she discovers a small bottle on a glass table, labelled ‘DRINK ME’. With other options not forthcoming, she uncorks the bottle, musters her courage and drinks. Suddenly she starts shrinking, and eventually finds herself only a few inches tall. But she’s left the key on the table, which now towers beside her. Beneath it she finds a tiny cake with the words ‘EAT ME’ spelled out in currants. She obediently gobbles up the cake, and now grows incredibly tall, losing sight of her feet far below. ‘Curious and curiouser!’, she cries.
Back on solid ground, no magical potions can physically scale our bodies to those extremes experienced by Alice, but shape shifting is far from fiction. Alice in Wonderland syndrome (AiWS) refers to the perception of objects as being too small or too large due to a conflation of size and distance from the observer. The disturbing product of this can be a sensation of body parts growing or shrinking. Bouts of AiWS can be naturally occurring, but are also common experiences from some anti-epileptic medicines and psychedelic drugs. ‘One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small’, advises Jefferson Airplane, ‘Go ask Alice, when she’s ten feet tall’. This condition plays with sense of scale, but others toy with shape. Since 1850, there have been 13 confirmed cases of clinical lycanthropy, the delusion of turning into a wolf. Similar cases have been described for full or partial transformations into wild boars, geese, crocodiles, Bengali tigers and boa constrictors, to name a few. Marginally more common are reports of xenomelia, in which body parts are considered not to belong to the owner, and this is often linked to a strong desire for amputation of the incriminating limb. The shape and size of the self is fluid, and not inextricably linked to our anatomy.
Alice stretches out to ten-feet tall after finding the ‘EAT ME’ cake.
The fluidity of our experience is also shown in our ability to abandon our bodies altogether. Henrik Ehrsson of the Karolinska Institute’s Brain, Body and Self Laboratory designs experiments to probe how representations of the physical self are established in the mind. In a favourite example, a participant wears a headset that plays them live film footage of the back of their own head. In parallel, their chest is prodded at the same time as a space just beneath the camera. If this is timed perfectly, the remarkable result is a dissociation of the self to a position a couple of metres behind the body. The effect is so strong that participants will not even flinch when they see their own bodies being attacked with a hammer, but they will if it is swung towards the camera. The self can be removed from the body, and it can also be coaxed into others. Ehrsson’s lab have used similar approaches to infuse people into mannequins, and dolls the size of action men. This is simply by synchronising false visual and tactile cues, generating real life Alice in Wonderland experiences free of potions and magic. Importantly, this is in spite of the vast amount of other information telling the participant the experience cannot be real – the fact that the lab technicians are now giants, and that their new bodies are inanimate plastic shells.
Henrik Ehrsson generating a transitory out of body experience by streaming the participant film footage of the back of their head and synchronously prodding the camera tripod and the participant’s chest.
A member of Ehrsson’s lab coaxes a participant’s bodily self into that of a doll.
The self is fluid enough to perfuse any body with a human-like form, and does so through a constant relay of information between the brain and the senses. Sensory nerves that innervate our muscles, joints and skin provide detailed information on our composition of body parts and how they are organised in space. This summates into a mental model of the body in our minds, which is mapped out onto corresponding objects that fit the bill in our visual field. As we grow, and change in shape and weight, this map is constantly updated. It allows us to keep check on where we end and the environment begins, and it ensures a constant training of how to use our bodies to execute effective change within it. It’s an extremely clever and important system, occurring entirely beneath the radar of our conscious experience. That is, until it malfunctions. While still very mysterious, it seems to be disruption in the relay of this information that leads to incongruence between the shape of the anatomy and that of the self. This can be from physical lesion to the nervous system, chemical imbalance in the brain, and strong psychological influences on expectation and perception of bodily form. With this, bodies warp in size and proportion, are disowned, adopt lives of their own, or appear to morph into those of other animals.
We’re rarely obliged to question the composition of our bodies, or whether they really belong to us. After all, our organs, bones and muscles are intricately fused, wired and plumbed together into a single biological unit. What makes me me is everything that comes in the box. Surely? But pathologies and illusions reveal the knowledge that we take for granted, in this case dynamic feelings and images of the self generated by a complex dialogue between mind and body humming away in the background. This takes us from a series of parts to a unified whole that will function coherently for a lifetime. Nonetheless, quirks and pathologies in the system reveal our images of ourselves to be error prone-predictions rather than objective realities, and a capacity to shape shift well beyond the limits of the static body.
You may find this unsettling, but just ask Alice, when she’s ten feet tall.
The Anatomical Snuffbox 