Hallucinations

by Oliver Sacks

thus to observe the precise coinciding of their “theophanies” with seizure activity in temporal lobe seizure foci (nearly always these are right-sided).9

described how one of their patients had a seizure-related vision in which “he saw Christ and heard a voice that commanded him to kill his wife and then himself. He proceeded to act upon the hallucinations,” killing his wife and then stabbing himself. This patient ceased to have seizures after the seizure focus in his right temporal lobe was removed.

that Joan of Arc may have had temporal lobe epilepsy with ecstatic auras.

Such a strange juxtaposition of a medieval historical figure with a modern medical diagnosis. This strangeness probably has to do with my irrational intuition that these medical conditions didn't exist prior to their discoveries.

I was thirteen when I had a Voice from God for my help and guidance. The first time that I heard this Voice, I was very much frightened; it was mid-day, in the summer, in my father’s garden … I heard this Voice to my right, towards the Church; rarely do I hear it without its being accompanied also by a light. This light comes from the same side as the Voice. Generally it is a great light.… When I heard it for the third time, I recognized that it was the Voice of an Angel. This voice has always guarded me well, and I have always understood it; it instructed me to be good and to go often to Church; it told me it was necessary for me to come into France … it said to me two or three times a week: “You must go into France.” … It said to me: “Go, raise the siege which is being made before the City of Orleans. Go!” … and I replied that I was but a poor girl, who knew nothing of riding or fighting.… There is never a day when I do not hear this Voice; and I have much need of it.

putative

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?

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 gi...

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.

One does not see with the eyes; one sees with the brain,

Almost poetic

hemianopia.