41. Beginning in 1861, when he was twenty-four, Hughlings Jackson published many major papers—on epilepsy, aphasia, and other subjects, as
well as what he called “evolution and dissolution in the nervous system.” A selection of these, filling two large volumes, was published in 1931, twenty years after his death. In his
later years, Jackson published a series of twenty-one short, gemlike papers in the
42. David Ferrier, a contemporary of Gowers’s, moved to London in 1870, where he was mentored by Hughlings Jackson (Ferrier became a great experimental neurologist in his own right—he was the first to use electrical stimulation to map the monkey’s brain). One of Ferrier’s epileptic patients had a remarkable synesthetic aura, in which she would experience “a smell like that of green thunder.” (This is quoted by Macdonald Critchley in his 1939 paper on visual and auditory hallucinations.)
43. Hughlings Jackson described such seizures in 1875 and thought they might originate from a structure in the brain located beneath the olfactory cortex, the uncinate gyrus. In 1898 Jackson and W. S. Colman were able to confirm this by autopsy in Dr. Z., a patient who had died of an overdose of chloral hydrate. (More recently, David C. Taylor and Susan M. Marsh have recounted the fascinating history of Dr. Z., an eminent physician named Arthur Thomas Myers whose brother, F. W. H. Myers, had founded the Society for Psychical Research.)
44. In the 1946 film
45. Penfield was a great physiologist as well as a neurosurgeon, and in the process of searching for epileptic foci, he was able to map most of
the basic functions of the living human brain. He showed, for example, exactly where sensations and movements of specific body parts were represented in the cerebral cortex—his sensory and
motor homunculi are iconic. Like Weir Mitchell, Penfield was an engaging writer, and after he and Herbert Jasper published their magnum opus,
46. For Gowers and his contemporaries in the early twentieth century, memories were imprints in the brain (as for Socrates they were analogous to impressions made in soft wax)—imprints that could be activated by the act of recollection. It was not until the crucial studies of Frederic Bartlett at Cambridge in the 1920s and 1930s that this classical view could be disputed. Whereas Ebbinghaus and other early investigators had studied rote memory—how many digits could be remembered, for instance—Bartlett presented his subjects with pictures or stories and then questioned and requestioned them over a period of months. Their accounts of what they had seen or heard were somewhat different (and sometimes quite transformed) on each re-remembering. These experiments convinced Bartlett to think in terms not of a static thing called “memory,” but rather a dynamic process of “remembering.” He wrote:
Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past reactions or experience. . . . It is thus hardly ever really exact.
47. Penfield sometimes used the term “flashback” for experiential hallucinations. The term is also used in quite different contexts, as in post-traumatic flashbacks, where there are recurrent hallucinatory replayings of traumatic events.
The term “flashback” is also used for a sudden, transient reexperiencing of a drug effect—suddenly feeling, for example, the effects of LSD, even though one has not taken it for months.
48. One such patient, who had very little in the way of religious interests as an adult, had his first religious seizure at a picnic, as Devinsky described to me: “His friends observed at first that he stared, became pale, and was unresponsive. Then suddenly, he began to run in circles for two or three minutes yelling, ‘I am free! I am free! . . . I am Jesus! I am Jesus!’ ”
