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.
