5. In the 1946 film
6. 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,
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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!’ ”
The patient later had a similar seizure which was recorded on video EEG, and, just before the seizure, Devinsky noted, the patient was slow to respond and disoriented regarding time and place:
When asked if there was anything wrong, he replied: “nothing is wrong, I am doing well … I am very happy” and when asked whether he knew where he was, he replied with a smile and a surprised look: “Of course I know. I am in heaven right now;… I am fine.”
He remained in this state for ten minutes, then went on to a generalized seizure. Later, he remembered his ecstatic aura “as if it were a vivid and happy dream” from which he had now awoken, but he had no memory of the questions put to him during the aura.
10. She ran as a Republican in a district that had been Democratic for a very long time, and lost by only a narrow margin. Whenever she appeared in public during her campaign, she said that God had told her to run, and this apparently persuaded thousands of people to vote for her, despite her manifest lack of political experience or skills.
11. The evidence here has been discussed in a number of books, including Kevin Nelson’s
