Abstract
When I was about to become a psychiatrist, I was invited for an assessment interview by the director of the department where I had just finished the final stretch of my training programme. Despite being 15 years my senior, he had a youthful and athletic appearance, which may or may not have been due to the fact that, at middle age, he was still running the annual marathon. Perhaps fitting for a runner, he was a man of few words. Also, he used to take his time searching for the right words to speak—so much so, that it was sometimes hard for us residents not to say out loud what we thought he was going to say. Luckily, one of the basic skills of the psychiatric training programme involved the art of biting our tongue and waiting for whatever our conversational partner would bring up next. That skill came in handy while dealing with the director and saved me, at least, from a great deal of social awkwardness during my training.
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Notes
- 1.
In this context, the term ‘halo ’ should not to be confused with the ring that we all tend to see on foggy nights around street lanterns or the moon. That type of halo is not a metamorphopsia but rather a physical illusion , which means that it is a type of misperception based on the laws of physics. Obviously, there is no actual ring out there. The light from the moon and the lanterns is dispersed by tiny droplets of water in the air and reflected in such a way that we perceive it as a ring-like structure surrounding them. The corona phenomenon , on the other hand, has nothing to do with the dispersion of light or any atmospheric circumstances.
- 2.
Especially when epileptic activity confines itself to a localised, circumscript brain area, even prolonged episodes may be too subtle in nature to register on an EEG . Moreover, Dimitri’s EEG had been made with scalp electrodes alone, which means that only the brain’s top layers had been explored and that epileptic activity, if present in deeper layers of the brain, might still have gone undetected.
- 3.
I had worked with Sacks before on a book chapter on musical hallucination s [9].
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Blom, J.D. (2020). Inside the Consulting Room. In: Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18609-8_2
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