9781422280126

and this hand would hang up the phone … I would light a cigarette and this one would put it out. I would be drinking cof- fee and this hand would dump it.” This ailment is different from typical involun- tary limb movement in that the hand is goal oriented—its motion has a purpose. It can occur after brain surgery, stroke, infection, tumor, aneurysm, or specific degenerative brain conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and Creutzfeldt-Ja- kob disease. When it comes to freaky phenom- ena, these disorders of the mind are very unusual. This volume takes a more in-depth look at a few prominent men- tal infirmities—multiple personality dis- order, foreign accent syndrome, Cotard delusion (the delusion of being dead), Capgras syndrome (face blindness), and Munchausen syndrome. At one point in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures inWonderland Alice doubles in size and sees objects much, much, smaller than they are in real life.The neurological disorder, micropsia, causes things to appear small, similar to Alice’s experience.

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Personality