Perhaps such experiences are at the root of our human obsession with pattern and the fact that geometrical patterns find their way into our decorative arts. As a child, I was fascinated by the patterns in our house — the square colored floor tiles on the front porch, the small hexagonal ones in the kitchen, the herringbone pattern on the curtains in my room, the check pattern on my father’s suit. When I was taken to the synagogue for services, I was more interested in the mosaics of tiny tiles on the floor than in the religious liturgy. And I loved the pair of antique Chinese cabinets in our drawing room, for embossed on their lacquered surfaces were designs of wonderful intricacy on different scales, patterns nested within patterns, all surrounded by clusters of tendrils and leaves. These geometric and scrolling motifs seemed somehow familiar to me, though it did not dawn on me until years later that this was because I had seen them in my own head, that these patterns resonated with my own inner experience of the intricate tilings and swirls of migraine.
Migraine-like patterns, indeed, can be found in Islamic art, in classical and medieval motifs, in Zapotec architecture, in the bark paintings of Aboriginal artists in Australia, in Acoma pottery, in Swazi basketry — in virtually every culture, going back tens of thousands of years. There seems to have been, throughout human history, a need to externalize and make art from these internal experiences, from the cross-hatchings of prehistoric cave paintings to the swirling psychedelic art of the 1960s. Do the arabesques and hexagons in our own minds, built into our brain organization, provide us with our first intimations of formal beauty?
There is an increasing feeling among neuroscientists that self-organizing activity in vast populations of visual neurons is a prerequisite of visual perception — that this is how seeing begins. Spontaneous self-organization is not restricted to living systems; one may see it in the formation of snow crystals, in the roilings and eddies of turbulent water, in certain oscillating chemical reactions. Here, too, self-organization can produce geometries and patterns in space and time very similar to what one may see in a migraine aura. In this sense, the geometrical hallucinations of migraine allow us to experience in ourselves not only a universal of neural functioning but a universal of nature itself.
1. A migraine headache often occurs on only one side (hence the term, which derives from the Greek for “hemi” and “cranium”). But it can also be on both sides, and can range from a dull or throbbing ache to excruciating pain, as J. C. Peters described in his 1853
The character of the pains varied very much; most frequently they were of a hammering, throbbing or pushing nature.… [in other cases] pressing and dull … boring with sense of bursting … pricking … rending … stretching … piercing … and radiating.… In a few cases it felt as if a wedge was pressed into the head, or like an ulcer, or as if the brain was torn, or pressed outwards.
2. This woman, Ingrid K., also reported that she sometimes has “another strange experience just before the migraine … I think I recognize everyone I see. I don’t know who they are … but everyone looks familiar.” Other correspondents have described a similar “hyperfamiliarity” at the start of migraine — and this feeling is occasionally part of an epileptic aura, as Orrin Devinsky and his colleagues have described.
Epilepsy affects a substantial minority of the population, occurs in all cultures, and has been recognized since the dawn of recorded history. It was known to Hippocrates as the sacred disease, a disorder of divine inspiration.1 And yet in its major, convulsive form (the only form recognized until the nineteenth century), it has attracted fear, hostility, and cruel discrimination. It still carries a good deal of stigma today.
Epileptic attacks — often called seizures or fits — can take a dozen or more forms. These have in common a sudden onset (sometimes without any warning, but sometimes with a characteristic prodrome or aura) and a basis in a sudden, abnormal electrical discharge in the brain. In generalized seizures, this discharge arises from both halves of the brain simultaneously. In a grand mal seizure, there is violent, convulsive movement of the muscles, biting of the tongue, and sometimes foaming at the mouth; there may also be a harsh, inhuman-sounding “epileptic cry.” Within seconds, the person having a grand mal seizure will lose consciousness and fall to the ground (epilepsy was also called “the falling sickness”). Such attacks can be terrifying to see.
