Ecstatic or religious or mystical seizures occur in only a small number of those who have temporal lobe epilepsy. Is this because there is something special — a preexisting disposition to religion or metaphysical belief — in these particular people? Or is it because the seizure stimulates particular parts of the brain that serve to mediate religious feeling?11 Both, of course, could be the case. And yet quite skeptical people, indifferent to religion, not given to religious belief, may — to their own astonishment — have a religious experience during a seizure.
Kenneth Dewhurst and A. W. Beard, in a 1970 paper, provided several examples of this. One related to a bus conductor who had an ecstatic seizure while collecting fares:
He was suddenly overcome with a feeling of bliss. He felt he was literally in Heaven. He collected the fares correctly, telling his passengers at the same time how pleased he was to be in Heaven.… He remained in this state of exaltation, hearing divine and angelic voices, for two days. Afterwards he was able to recall these experiences and he continued to believe in their validity.… During the next two years, there was no change in his personality; he did not express any peculiar notions but remained religious.… Three years later, following three seizures on three successive days, he became elated again. He stated that his mind had “cleared.” … During this episode he lost his faith.
He now no longer believed in heaven and hell, in an afterlife, or in the divinity of Christ. This second conversion — to atheism — carried the same excitement and revelatory quality as the original religious conversion. (Geschwind, in a 1974 lecture subsequently published in 2009, noted that patients with temporal lobe epilepsy might have multiple religious conversions and described one of his own patients as “a girl in her twenties who is now on her fifth religion.”)
Ecstatic seizures shake one’s foundations of belief, one’s world picture, even if one has previously been wholly indifferent to any thought of the transcendent or supernatural. And the universality of fervent mystical and religious feelings — a sense of the holy — in every culture suggests that there may indeed be a biological basis for them; they may, like aesthetic feelings, be part of our human heritage. To speak of a biological basis and biological precursors of religious emotion — and even, as ecstatic seizures suggest, a very specific neural basis, in the temporal lobes and their connections — is only to speak of natural causes. It says nothing of the value, the meaning, the “function” of such emotions, or of the narratives and beliefs we may construct on their basis.
1. When Hippocrates wrote “On the Sacred Disease,” he was bowing to the then-popular notion of epilepsy’s divine origin, but he dismisses this in his opening sentence: “The disease called sacred … appears to me no more sacred than other diseases, but has a natural cause from which it originates, like other affections.”
2. 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
3. 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.)
4. 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.)
