Alice In Wonderland syndrome
Alice in Wonderland syndrome (AIWS), or micropsia, is a disorienting neurological condition which affects human visual perception. It is the reverse of macropsia. For example, a family pet, such as a dog, may appear the size of a mouse, or a normal car may look shrunk to scale.
Subjects perceive humans, parts of humans, animals, and inanimate objects as substantially smaller than in reality. Generally, the object perceived appears far away or extremely close at the same time. This leads to another name for the condition, Lilliput sight or Lilliputian hallucinations, named after the small people in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. The condition is in terms of perception only; the mechanics of the eye are not affected, only the brain’s interpretation of information passed from the eyes.
In The Guardian, Rik Hemsley describes life with the spatial distortions of Alice In Wonderland Syndrome. From his essay:
When it first happened, I was a 21-year-old undergraduate. I had been up late the night before writing my dissertation and drinking a lot of coffee, but on that particular morning I was stone cold sober and hangover-free. I stood up, reached down to pick up the TV remote control from the floor and felt my foot sink into the ground. Glancing down, I saw that my leg was plunging into the carpet. It was a disturbing sensation, but it lasted only a few seconds, so I put it down to over-tiredness and forgot all about it.
It wasn’t long, however, before I started experiencing more extreme spatial distortions. Floors either curved or dipped, and when I tried walking on them, it felt as though I was staggering on sponges. When I lay in bed and looked at my hands, my fingers stretched off half a mile into the distance.
[lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk via boingboing.net]
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you get the same effect when peakin on E XD