Epilepsy Quotes

People think that epilepsy is divine simply because they don't have any idea what causes epilepsy. But I believe that someday we will understand what causes epilepsy, and at that moment, we will cease to believe that it's divine. And so it is with everything in the universe

If Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana were "candles in the wind," and Anna Nicole Smith was a bonfire in a hailstorm, and Lindsay Lohan is an electric toaster thrown intentionally into a Jacuzzi, then Paris Hilton s a strobe light in an epilepsy ward.

...But he was a good landlord. When my heater stopped working in mid-December, it took him only two weeks to get it fixed. Of course, it took me knocking on his door in need of a warm place to sleep to get it that way, but one night on his sofa, where I’d suddenly developed night terrors and epilepsy, and that puppy was running like a Mercedes the next day. It was awesome.

Conventional belief holds that after triumphing over a mid-career bout with polio, FDR went on to serve two vigorous terms as gov- ernor of New York and three-plus more as president of the United States, succumbing unexpectedly to a stroke on April 12, 1945. In truth, Franklin spent those eventful twenty-four years battling swarms of maladies including polio’s ongoing crippling effects, life-threatening gastrointestinal bleeding, two incurable cancers, severe cardiovascular disease, and epilepsy.

There's nothing more debilitating about a disability than the way people treat you over it.

I'm not an epileptic but you're an arsehole. I'm important. I matter. I can do anything. I'm a sexy, strong woman that happens to have epilepsy. Do you get it? I have epilepsy but it's not who I am.

In itself, every idea is neutral, or should be; but man animates ideas, projects his flames and flaws into them; impure, transformed into beliefs, ideas take their place in time, take shape as events: the trajectory is complete, from logic to epilepsy . . . whence the birth of ideologies, doctrines, deadly games. Idolaters by instinct, we convert the objects of our dreams and our interests into the Unconditional. History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable. Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create fake gods, he feverishly adopts them: his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.

The history of epilepsy can be summarised as 4,000 years of ignorance, superstition and stigma followed by 100 years of knowledge, superstition and stigma.

You all, healthy people, can’t imagine the happiness which we epileptics feel during the second before our fit... I don’t know if this felicity lasts for seconds, hours or months, but believe me, I would not exchange it for all the joys that life may bring.

Hippocrates wrote: “Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things.

We got there without being spotted. I pulled her in, then shut the door, pressing my back to it and exhaling like an epileptic pilot who'd just landed a cargo plane full of dynamite.

Superstition is thriving. Pedantry is thriving. Sectarianism is thriving. Belief is dying out. To most of your people the jinn are paranoid fantasies who run around causing epilepsy and mental illness. Find me someone to whom the hidden folk are simply real, as described in the Books. You’ll be searching a long time. Wonder and awe have gone out of your religions. You are prepared to accept the irrational, but not the transcendent. And that, cousin, is why I can’t help you.

It’s easier for me to make sense of it that way than it is for me to face the other way—reality. And yet, those evil spirits that were unleashed—be they fake entities from a stupid carnival ride, or cruel malevolencies from dark spiritual chasms of our universe—have stayed with me all these years

Epilepsy,” he repeats, then covers his face with his hands so it comes out muffled when he says it again. “I have epilepsy.

There are few chemicals that we as a people are exposed to that have as many far reaching physiological affects on living beings as Monosodium Glutamate does. MSG directly causes obesity, diabetes, triggers epilepsy, destroys eye tissues, is genotoxic in many organs and is the probable cause of ADHD and Autism. Considering that MSG’s only reported role in food is that of ‘flavour enhancer’ is that use worth the risk of the myriad of physical ailments associated with it? Does the public really want to be tricked into eating more food and faster by a food additive?

I leave the kitchen table to bathe, and to dress for church. If only my closet held on its shelves an array of faces I could wear rather than dresses, I would know which face to put on today. As for the dresses, I haven't a clue.

Dissociative symptoms—primarily depersonalization and derealization—are elements in other DSM-IV disorders, including schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder, and in the neurologic syndrome of temporal lobe epilepsy, also called complex partial seizures. In this latter disorder, there are often florid symptoms of depersonalization and realization, but most amnesia symptoms derive from difficulties with focused attention rather than forgetting previously learned information.

If an epileptic seizure is focused in a particular sweet spot in the temporal lobe, a person won´t have motor seizures, but instead something more subtle. The effect is something like a cognitive seizure, marked by changes of personality, hyperreligiosity (an obsession with religion and feelings of religious certainity), hypergraphia (extensive writing on a subject, usually about religion), the false sense of an external presence, and, often, the hearing voices that are attributed to a god. Some fraction of history´s prophets, martyrs, and leaders appear to have had temporal lobe epilepsy. When the brain activity is kindled in the right spot, people hear voices. If a physician prescribes an anti-epileptic medication, the seizures go away and the voices disappear. Our reality depends on what our biology is up to.

For if a man by magical arts and sacrifices will bring down the moon, and darken the sun, and induce storms, or fine weather, I should not believe that there was anything divine, but human, in these things, provided the power of the divine were overpowered by human knowledge and subjected to it.

What the hell is that?" I jumped and glanced over to see Kristof staring at Grady, who was waving his arms, rolling his eyes, shaking and moaning. "I think he's possessed," I said. "By what? Epilepsy?

A big seizure just kind of grabs the inside of your skull and squeezes. It feels as if it's twisting and turning your brain all up and down and inside out. Have you ever heard a washing machine suddenly flip into that bang-bang-bang sound when it gets out of balance, or a chain saw when the chain breaks and gets caught up in the gears, or an animal like a cat, screeching in pain? Those are what seizures felt like when I was little.

But behind every misguided treatment—from Ottomans eating clay to keep the plague away to Victorian gents sitting in a mercury steam room for their syphilis to epilepsy sufferers sipping gladiator blood in ancient Rome—is the incredible power of the human desire to live.

a ‘musical epilepsy’ or a ‘personal epilepsy’ would seem a contradiction in terms. And yet such epilepsies do occur, though solely in the context of temporal lobe seizures, epilepsies of the reminiscent part of the brain.

The phono-lecturer began the description of the recently invented musicometer. “… By merely rotating this handle anyone is enabled to produce about three sonatas per hour. What difficulties our predecessors had in making music! They were able to compose only by bringing themselves to attacks of inspiration, an extinct form of epilepsy.

Listen, we’ll come visit you. Okay? I’ll dress up as William Shakespeare, Lucent as Emily Dickinson, and beautiful ‘Ray’ as someone dashing and manly like Jules Verne or Ernest Hemingway...and we’ll write on your white-room walls. We’ll write you out of your supposed insanity. I love you, Micky Affias. -James (from "Descendants of the Eminent")

Oh- hey, there," he said. He was shorter than me, pudgy with salt-and-pepper hair that always seemed to be in need of a good conditioning. And he always wore sweatpants and T-shirts that had seen more abuse than narcotics. But he was a good landlord. When my heater stopped working in mid-December, it took him only two weeks to get it fixed. Of course, it took me knocking on his door in need of a warm place to sleep to get it that way, but one night on his sofa, where I'd suddenly developed night terrors and epilepsy, and that puppy was running like a Mercedes the next day. It was awesome.

Then it happened. One night as the rain beat on the slanted kitchen roof a great spirit slipped forever into my life. I held his book in my hands and trembled as he spoke to me of man and the world, of love and wisdom, pain and guilt, and I knew I would never be the same. His name was Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky. He knew more of fathers and sons than any man in the world, and of brothers and sisters, priests and rogues, guilt and innocence. Dostoyevsky changed me. The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov, The Gambler. He turned me inside out. I found I could breathe, could see invisible horizons. The hatred for my father melted. I loved my father, poor, suffering, haunted wretch. I loved my mother too, and all my family. It was time to become a man, to leave San Elmo and go out into the world. I wanted to think and feel like Dostoyevsky. I wanted to write. The week before I left town the draft board summoned me to Sacramento for my physical. I was glad to go. Someone other than myself could make my decisions. The army turned me down. I had asthma. Inflammation of the bronchial tubes. “That’s nothing. I’ve always had it.” “See your doctor.” I got the needed information from a medical book at the public library. Was asthma fatal? It could be. And so be it. Dostoyevsky had epilepsy, I had asthma. To write well a man must have a fatal ailment. It was the only way to deal with the presence of death.

Anyone who’s anyone in Dostoevsky’s novels sooner or later develops brain fever.

Electricity is life but electricity is an invisible fist punching up your spine, knocking your brains right out of your skull.

There’s a part of the human brain, the temporal lobe, that is associated with religious experiences as well as with epilepsy.

Being open about epilepsy assists in de-stigmatising the condition which should never be a source of shame.

We enjoy lovely music, beautiful paintings, a thousand intellectual delicacies, but we have no idea of their cost, to those who invented them, in sleepless nights, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthmas, epilepsies, and the fear of death, which is worse than all the rest.

Wolves exhibiting strange behaviour -- caught in traps and thrashing about, injured by other creatures or by bullets, pups suffering from epilepsy -- are attacked and killed by their pack members. But here everyone is human and must try to understand each other's mystery. Each other's pain.

I later learned that while Elsie was at Crownsville, scientists often conducted research on patients there without consent, including one study titled "Pneumoencephalographic and skull X-ray studies in 100 epileptics." Pneumoencephalography was a technique developed in 1919 for taking images of the brain, which floats in a sea of liquid. That fluid protects the brain from damage, but makes it very difficult to X-ray, since images taken through fluid are cloudy. Pneumoencephalography involved drilling holes into the skulls of research subjects, draining the fluid surrounding their brains, and pumping air or helium into the skull in place of the fluid to allow crisp X-rays of the brain through the skull. the side effects--crippling headaches, dizziness, seizures, vomiting--lasted until the body naturally refilled the skull with spinal fluid, which usually took two to three months. Because pneumoencephalography could cause permanent brain damage and paralysis, it was abandoned in the 1970s. "There is no evidence that the scientists who did research on patients at Crownsville got consent from either the patients of their parents. Bases on the number of patients listed in the pneumoencephalography studyand the years it was conducted, Lurz told me later, it most likely involved every epileptic child in the hospital including Elsie. The same is likely true of at lest on other study called "The Use of Deep Temporal Leads in the Study of Psychomotor Epilepsy," which involved inserting metal probes into patients' brains.

For the first time in a long while I was in the mood to accomplish something. I switched off the TV and pulled out the Oriole epilepsy drug ads and spread them over my desk. Then I picked up my red pen and went to work.

In a typical passage Hippocrates wrote: 'Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things.

[Epilepsy] gave her an adversity to fight against. It had shaped her personality, the need to be careful and secretive, and the ability to see things a bit differently from the neurotypical. She granted that this feeling of having a broken brain that required her to be sensitive, to look always inward to survive, might be why she turned artist.

Can there be anything more stupendous than the [Hindu] conception that the universe has no beginning and no end, but passes everlastingly from growth to equilibrium, from equilibrium to decline, from decline to dissolution, from dissolution to growth, and so on to all eternity?" "Which presupposes belief in the transmigration of souls." "It's a belief held by two thirds of the human race." "The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth." "No, but at least it makes it worthy of consideration. Christianity absorbed so much of New-Platonism, it might very easily have absorbed that too, and in point of fact there was an early Christian sect that believed in it, but it was declared heretical. Except for that Christians would believe in it as confidently as they believe in the resurrection of Christ." "Am I right in thinking that it means that the soul passes from body to body in an endless course of experience occasioned by the merit or demerit of previous works?" "I think so." "But you see, I'm not only my spirit but my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevski Dostoyevski without his epilepsy?" "The Indians wouldn't speak of an accident. They would answer that it's your actions in previous lives that have determined your soul to inhabit an imperfect body.

Rubella, Talipes, Amsterdam dwarfism, Austism, Asthma, Eczema, Epilepsy - the Sacred Disease. Moth madness, Papa calls it. Said Daniel. The Epilepsy, Papa used to say I was his little papillon de nuit - because of how I fluttered and got the shakes. Butterfly of the night. It suited him.

The human brain is the universe's most implausible science experiment.

What difficulties our predecessors had in making music! They were able to compose only by bringing themselves to attacks of inspiration, an extinct form of epilepsy.

Since we’re exchanging medical info and shit, I disclose my own. “By the way, I have epilepsy. So, if you see me shaking and jerking, that’s not me attempting to twerk.

Outside of the surrender of the incommunicable, the suspension amid our mute and unconsoled anxieties, life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.

Once people with epilepsy were virtuously punished for their intimacy with Lucifer. Now we mandate that if their seizures aren’t under control, they can’t drive. And the key point is that no one views such a driving ban as virtuous, pleasurable punishment, believing that a person with treatment-resistant seizures “deserves” to be banned from driving. Crowds of goitrous yahoos don’t excitedly mass to watch the epileptic’s driver’s license be publicly burned. We’ve successfully banished the notion of punishment in that realm. It may take centuries, but we can do the same in all our current arenas of punishment.

Why do authors wish to pretend they don’t exist? It’s a way of skinning out, of avoiding truth and consequences. They’d like to deny the crime, although their fingerprints are allover the martini glasses, not to mention the hacksaw blade and the victim’s neck. Amnesia, they plead. Epilepsy. Sugar overdose. Demonic possession. How convenient to have an authorial twin, living in your body, looking out through your eyes, pushing pen down on paper or key down on keyboard, while you do what? File your nails? . . . A projection, a mass hallucination, a neurological disorder — call her what you will, but don’t confuse her with me.

1859. Some of the causes of insanity were listed as: ill health, loss of property, excessive use of tobacco, dissipation, domestic affliction, epilepsy, masterbation, home-sickness, injury of the head. The largest category was "unknown.

Reduced levels of ATP have been found in a wide variety of disorders, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression, alcoholism, PTSD, autism, OCD, Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and obesity.

it is twenty-two-thirty. Till tomorrow, then. Record Four The Wild Man with a Barometer – Epilepsy – If * * * * * * * Until today everything in life seemed to me clear (that is why, I think, I always had a sort of partiality toward the word “clear”), but today...

A neurosurgeon once told me about operating on the brain of a young man with epilepsy. As is customary in this kind of operation, the patient was wide awake, under only local anesthesia, while the surgeon delicately explored his exposed cortex, makingsure that the parts tentatively to be removed were not absolutely vital by stimulating them electrically and asking the patient what he experienced. Some stimulations provoked visual flashes or hand-raisings, others a sort of buzzing sensation, but one spot produced a delighted response from the patient: "It's 'Outta Get Me' by Guns N' Roses. my favorite heavy metal band!" I asked the neurosurgeon If he had asked the patient to sing or hum along with the music, since it would be fascinating to learn how "high fidelity" the provoked memory was, would it be in exactly the same key and tempo as the record? Such a song (unliken"Silent Night") has one canonical version. so we could simply have superimposed a recording of the patients humming with the standard record and compared the results. Unfortunately, even though a tape recorder had been running during the operation, thesurgeon hadn't asked the patient to sing along. ''Why not?" I asked, and he replied: "I hate rock music!' Later in the conversation the neurosurgeon happened to remark that he was going to have to operate again on the same young man. and I expressed the hope that he would just check to see if he could restimulate the rock music, and this time ask the fellow to sing along. "I can't do it." replied the neurosurgeon. "since I cut out that part." "It was part of the epileptic focus?" I asked. "No,'' the surgeon replied, ''I already told you — I hate rock music.

Silently, I mouthed the word to Demetri: “Epilepsy?” He nodded. I should have known: The kids were being fed a diet of fat, fat, and more fat. Only fat. More than a hundred years ago, physicians discovered that a diet consisting almost entirely of cream, oil, butter, and other fats could greatly decrease or even eliminate seizures in children with epilepsy.

Life is a gift. Never take it for granted.

People always told me to have faith. Faith in what? Science? God? It was just something to say when no one knew what else to say.

Never underestimate the potential of a person with a disability. You might be looking at a future author that will inspire the discouraged at heart.

I believe an infusion of silliness helps us cope with the seriousness of life.

The light of Selene's chariot will appear before you and serve as your path

I am Iris, Goddess of the Rainbow, the Sea and the Sky, and a Messenger to the Gods

the ketogenic diet was originally designed in the 1920s to help treat epilepsy, according to a report published in Epilepsia. It was proven to be an effective form of treatment, particularly for childhood epilepsy. Scientists soon discovered that its benefits extended beyond epilepsy treatment. It has also been found helpful in weight loss and the prevention of other diseases.

To cure epilepsy, doctors concocted recipes of dried human heart or made a potion of wine, lily, lavender, and an entire adult brain, which weighed about three pounds. Human fat was used to treat consumption, rheumatism, and gout. Physicians recommended those suffering from hemorrhoids to stroke them with the amputated hand of a dead man—a strangely unpalatable image to ponder.

Low amounts of vitamin B12 with normal folate levels may cause cognitive impairment and anemia, while high amounts of folate and normal vitamin B12 levels may improve cognitive function (132).

No more peeping through keyholes! No more mas turbating in the dark! No more public confessions! Unscrew the doors from their jambs! I want a world where the vagina is represented by a crude, honest slit, a world that has feeling for bone and contour, for raw, primary colors, a world that has fear and respect for its animal origins. I’m sick of looking at cunts all tickled up, disguised, deformed, idealized. Cunts with nerve ends exposed. I don’t want to watch young virgins masturbating in the privacy of their boudoirs or biting their nails or tearing their hair or lying on a bed full of bread crumbs for a whole chapter. I want Madagascan funeral poles, with animal upon animal and at the top Adam and Eve, and Eve with a crude, honest slit between the legs. I want hermaphrodites who are real hermaphrodites, and not make-believes walking around with an atrophied penis or a dried-up cunt. I want a classic purity, where dung is dung and angels are angels. The Bible a la King James, for example. Not the Bible of Wycliffe, not the Vulgate, not the Greek, not the Hebrew, but the glorious, death-dealing Bible that was created when the English language was in flower, when a vocabulary of twenty thousand words sufficed to build a monument for all time. A Bible written in Svenska or Tegalic, a Bible for the Hottentots or the Chinese, a Bible that has to meander through the trickling sands of French is no Bible-it is a counterfeit and a fraud. The King James Version was created by a race of bone-crushers. It revives the primitive mysteries, revives rape, murder, incest, revives epilepsy, sadism, megalomania, revives demons, angels, dragons, leviathans, revives magic, exorcism, contagion, incantation, revives fratricide, regicide, patricide, suicide, revives hypnotism, anarchism, somnambulism, revives the song, the dance, the act, revives the mantic, the chthonian, the arcane, the mysterious, revives the power, the evil, and the glory that is God. All brought into the open on a colossal scale, and so salted and spiced that it will last until the next Ice Age. A classic purity, then-and to hell with the Post Office authorities! For what is it enables the classics to live at all, if indeed they be living on and not dying as we and all about us are dying? What preserves them against the ravages of time if it be not the salt that is in them? When I read Petronius or Apuleius or Rabelais, how close they seem! That salty tang! That odor of the menagerie! The smell of horse piss and lion’s dung, of tiger’s breath and elephant’s hide. Obscenity, lust, cruelty, boredom, wit. Real eunuchs. Real hermaphrodites. Real pricks. Real cunts. Real banquets! Rabelais rebuilds the walls of Paris with human cunts. Trimalchio tickles his own throat, pukes up his own guts, wallows in his own swill. In the amphitheater, where a big, sleepy pervert of a Caesar lolls dejectedly, the lions and the jackals, the hyenas, the tigers, the spotted leopards are crunching real human boneswhilst the coming men, the martyrs and imbeciles, are walking up the golden stairs shouting Hallelujah!

By far the most important fat for brain energy utilization is beta-hydroxybutyrate (beta-HBA), and we’ll explore this unique fat in more detail in the next chapter. This is why the so-called ketogenic diet has been a treatment for epilepsy since the early 1920s and is now being reevaluated as a very powerful therapeutic option in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease,

Even though the world hails Joan of Arc as some sort of hero, which she undoubtedly was, what pains me the most is that her pathological condition ultimately led to her demise at the age of only nineteen.

Als een sleep wordt de nachtschaduw over de aarde getrokken, en omdat na zonsondergang bijna iedereen tussen de wereldgordels zich te slapen legt, zo vervolgt hij, zou je wanneer je steeds de ondergaande zon volgt, voortdurend kunnen zien hoe de bol die wij bewonen vol ligt met een uitgestrekte, als door de zeis van Saturnus neer-gemaaide en geoogste lichamen - een eindeloos lang kerkhof voor een epileptische mensheid.

Sounds like an acid head, of course. What they all saw in … a flash was the solution to the basic predicament of being human, the personal I, Me, trapped, mortal and helpless, in a vast impersonal It, the world around me. Suddenly! —All-in-one!—flowing together, I into It, and It into Me, and in that flow I perceive a power, so near and so clear, that the whole world is blind to. All the modern religions, and the occult mysteries, for that matter, talk about an Other World—whether Brahma’s or the flying saucers’—that the rational work-a-day world is blind to. The—so called! friends—rational world. If only they, Mom & Dad & Buddy & Sis, dear-but-square ones, could but know the kairos, the supreme moment … The historic visions have been explained in many ways, as the result of epilepsy, self-hypnosis, changes in metabolism due to fasting, or actual intervention by gods—or drugs: Zoroastrianism

That’s one of the reasons that many people with epilepsy have found success with the so-called ketogenic diet. The ketogenic diet forces the body to take energy from healthy fats. These healthy fats are rich with deuterium-depleted water. That also may be why many find benefits from fasting because it forces our body to burn our fat stores. This causes the release of deuterium-depleted water from within our own fat cells, fueling healthy mitochondria.

sister’s epilepsy. By the time I began working with him the golden years of doping were almost over. Thirty-four million people were attending greyhound races a year. But now the racing clubs were setting up saliva and urine tests, so The Darter needed to find another solution where betting on dogs would once again not rely only on logic and talent. What followed was The Darter’s use of imposters or ringers in order to bring confusion and chance back to the

Though diagnosis is unquestionably critical in treatment considerations for many severe conditions with a biological substrate (for example, schizophrenia, bipolar disorders, major affective disorders, temporal lobe epilepsy, drug toxicity, organic or brain disease from toxins, degenerative causes, or infectious agents), diagnosis is often counterproductive in the everyday psychotherapy of less severely impaired patients. Why? For one thing, psychotherapy consists of a gradual unfolding process wherein the therapist attempts to know the patient as fully as possible. A diagnosis limits vision; it diminishes ability to relate to the other as a person. Once we make a diagnosis, we tend to selectively inattend to aspects of the patient that do not fit into that particular diagnosis, and correspondingly overattend to subtle features that appear to confirm an initial diagnosis. What’s more, a diagnosis may act as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Relating to a patient as a “borderline” or a “hysteric” may serve to stimulate and perpetuate those very traits. Indeed, there is a long history of iatrogenic influence on the shape of clinical entities, including the current controversy about multiple-personality disorder and repressed memories of sexual abuse. And keep in mind, too, the low reliability of the DSM personality disorder category (the very patients often engaging in longer-term psychotherapy).

In my writing and lectures, I try to refer to, for example, lepers, schizophrenics, or epileptics instead as, “people with” leprosy, schizophrenia, or epilepsy. It is a reminder both that there are actual humans involved in these maladies and that such people are not merely their disease. I’m dropping that convention in this section, reflecting the nature of this historical event—for the promulgators of this savagery, their actions did not concern “people with leprosy.” They concerned “the lepers.

You took a social problem--parents divorcing, mother a nymphomaniac, father drunk or gay (or both), brother on drugs, child crippled or bullied, a moron in the family, epilepsy, poverty (but only if you were stuck for a problem; poverty was too easy)--and you wrote about this Problem in stark, distressing terms. Then--this is the Rule--you gave it to the child with that problem to read. The child was supposed to delight in the insight and to see his own parents (or brother or disability) as a joyful challenge.

Mama: But something might happen. Something that might change everything. Who knows what it might be, but it might be worth waiting for! (Jessie doesn't respond.) Try if for two more weeks. Jessie: No, Mama Mama: i'll pay more attention to you. Tell the truth when you ask me. Let you have your say. Jessie: No, Mama. This is how I have my say. This is how I say what I thought about it ALL and I say No. To Dawson and Loretta and the Red Chinese and epilepsy and Ricky and Cicel and you. And me. And hope. I say No.,

The air was filled with a big noise and I tried to move. I felt the heaven was going down upon the earth and that it had engulfed me. I have really touched God. He came into me myself, yes God exists, I cried, and I don’t remember anything else. You all, healthy people, he said, can’t imagine the happiness which we epileptics feel during the second or so before our fit.… I don’t know if this felicity lasts for seconds, hours or months, but believe me, for all the joys that life may bring, I would not exchange this one.

For reasons we don't yet understand, the tendency to synchronize is one of the most pervasive drives in the universe, extending from atoms to animals, from people to planets. Female friends or coworkers who spend a great deal of time together often find that their menstrual periods tend to start around the same day. Sperm swimming side by side en route to the egg beat their tails in unison, in a primordial display of synchronized swimming. Sometimes sync can be pernicious: Epilepsy is caused by millions of brain cells discharging in pathological lockstep, causing the rhythmic convulsions associated with seizures. Even lifeless things can synchronize. The astounding coherence of a laser beam comes from trillions of atoms pulsing in concert, all emitting photons of the same phase and frequency. Over the course of millennia, the incessant effects of the tides have locked the moon's spin to its orbit. It now turns on its axis at precisely the same rate as it circles the earth, which is why we always see the man in the moon and never its dark side.

The theme of the second half of this book is this: We’ve done it before. Over and over, in various domains, we’ve shown that we can subtract out a belief that actions are freely, willfully chosen, as we’ve become more knowledgeable, more reflective, more modern. And the roof has not caved in; society can function without our believing that people with epilepsy are in cahoots with Satan and that mothers of people with schizophrenia caused the disease by hating their child. But it will be hugely difficult to continue this arc,

I am Iris, Goddess of the Rainbow, the Sea and the Sky, and a Messenger to the Gods.’ ‘W-what?’ Any minute now, I’ll wake up! .‘I am here to deliver a message from the Great Moon Goddess Selene, who speaks to you through the song of the Siren, that which seduces the soul with its beauty.

He believed that touching the limits of human experience was something he shared with the Prophet Muhammad, who was also reputedly epileptic. Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin notes that Muhammad’s ecstasy took the form of a mythical white creature who whisked the prophet away “to survey all the dwellings of Allah” in the split second it took a jug of water to spill to the ground. That experience, Prince Myshkin says, is how he first grasped the biblical verse “time shall be no more.” Dostoevsky was describing an “ecstatic aura,” a phenomenon that researchers now realize affects some people with temporal lobe epilepsy.

Imagine you’re diagnosed with epilepsy: what would you think if you weren’t referred to a specialist but taken to a psychiatrist to treat you for your ‘false illness beliefs’? This is what happens to Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) patients in the UK. They are told to ignore their symptoms, view themselves as healthy, and increase their exercise. The NHS guidelines amalgamate ME and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, assuming symptoms are caused by deconditioning and ‘exercise phobia’. Sufferers are offered Graded Exercise to increase fitness, and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) to rid them of their ‘false illness beliefs’.

Mercedes took Richard to the hospital. He was examined perfunctorily and Mercedes was told he was an epileptic and was experiencing grand mal seizures. There was nothing to worry about—he’d “grow out of it.” He was not given any medication, nor was Mercedes asked to bring him back. At home, Ruth began noticing that her baby brother was having long staring spells in which he would just sit still and look at something—a wall, a table, the floor—for five, ten, fifteen minutes without speaking or moving. He was having petite mal seizures, but no one realized it then, and Richard wasn’t diagnosed or treated. Richard had one to two dozen of these petite mal attacks every month until he entered his early teens, when they, as well as the less frequent grand mal seizures, lessened and eventually stopped altogether. According to Dr. Ronald Geshwind, a certain number of people who suffer from temporal lobe epilepsy have altered sexuality and hyper-religious feelings, are hypergraphic (have a compulsion to write), and are excessively aggressive. Van Gogh, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Dostoevsky, and Lewis Carroll all suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy. Years later, after all the trouble, Richard would be diagnosed as having temporal lobe epilepsy.

Submit to being called a neurotic. You belong to that splendid and pitiable family which is the salt of the earth. All the greatest things We know have come to us from neurotics. It is they and they only who have founded religions and created great works of art. Never will the world be conscious of how much it owes to them, nor above all of what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it. We enjoy fine music, beautiful pictures, a thousand exquisite things, but we do not know what they cost those who wrought them in sleeplessness, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthma, epilepsy a terror of death which is worse than any of these, and which you perhaps have felt,

Long, long ago—when, it will be recalled, Megatherium roamed the trees—the same lop-eared impresario who said: “The acrobat shall be first,” also laid down the dictum that: “The show must go on,” and for as little reason. Accidents might happen, the juvenile might run off with the female lion-tamer, the ingénue might be howling drunk, the lady in the fifth row, right, might have chosen the theatre to be the scene of her monthly attack of epilepsy, fire might break out in Dressing Room A, but the show must go on. Not even a rare juicy homicide may annul the sacred dictum. The show must go on despite hell, high water, drunken managers named Kelly, and The Fantastic Affair of the Hanging Acrobat.

Once people with epilepsy were virtuously punished for their intimacy with Lucifer. Now we mandate that if their seizures aren’t under control, they can’t drive. And the key point is that no one views such a driving ban as virtuous, pleasurable punishment, believing that a person with treatment-resistant seizures 'deserves' to be banned from driving... it is important to remember that some, many, maybe even most of the people who were prosecuting epileptics in the fifteenth century were no different from us—sincere, cautious, and ethical, concerned about the serious problems threatening their society, hoping to bequeath their children a safer world. Just operating with an unrecognizably different mind-set.

Total seizure control for your goal may not always be wise. Sometimes it is better to contend with an occasional mild seizure than to have the constant debilitating side effects of too much medication. To the best of our knowledge, brief seizures do no brain damage." She stresses the need for the patient to share in the decision and for the physician to remember his oath: "First do no harm.

The deaths of writers aren’t special deaths; they just happen to be described deaths. I think of Flaubert lying on his sofa, struck down – who can tell at this distance? – by epilepsy, apoplexy or syphilis, or perhaps some malign axis of the three. Yet Zola called it une belle mort – to be crushed like an insect beneath a giant finger. I think of Bouilhet in his final delirium, feverishly composing a new play in his head and declaring that it must be read to Gustave. I think of the slow decline of Jules de Goncourt: first stumbling over his consonants, the c’s turning to t’s in his mouth; then being unable to remember the titles of his own books; then the haggard mask of imbecility (his brother’s phrase) slipping over his face; then the deathbed visions and panics, and all night long the rasping breaths that sounded (his brother’s words again) like a saw cutting through wet wood. I think of Maupassant slowly disintegrating from the same disease, transported in a strait-jacket to the Passy sanatorium of Dr Blanche, who kept the Paris salons entertained with news of his celebrated client; Baudelaire dying just as inexorably, deprived of speech, arguing with Nadar about the existence of God by pointing mutely at the sunset; Rimbaud, his right leg amputated, slowly losing all feeling in the limbs that remained, and repudiating, amputating his own genius –‘Merde pour la poésie’; Daudet ‘vaulting from forty-five to sixty-five’, his joints collapsing, able to become bright and witty for an evening by giving himself five morphine injections in a row, tempted by suicide –But one doesn’t have the right.

...epilepsijos metu būdavo viena stadija prieš pat priepuolį (jeigu tik priepuolis ištikdavo dar su sąmone), kada staiga, užėjus liūdesiui, dvasinei tamsai, slogumui, protarpiais tarytum įsiliepsnodavo jo smegenyse ir nepaprastai įsitempdavo iš karto visos jo gyvybinės galios. Gyvybės, sąmoningumo pojūtis beveik dešimteriopai padidėdavo tomis akimirkomis, kurios praeidavo kaip žaibas. Protas, širdis nutviksdavo nepaprasta šviesa; visas jo susijaudinimas, visos dvejonės, visas nerimas tarytum nuščiūdavo iš karto, ištirpdavo kažin kokioje aukštesnėje rimtyje, sklidinoje giedro, harmoningo džiaugsmo ir vilties, sklidinoje išminties bei galutinės priežasties. Bet tokie momentai, tie pragiedruliai tik pranašaudavo tą galutinę sekundę (niekuomet ne ilgiau nei vieną sekundę), kurią prasidėdavo pats priepuolis.

Never will the world be conscious of how much it owes to them, nor above all of what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it. We enjoy fine music, beautiful pictures, a thousand exquisite things, but we do not know what they cost those who wrought them in sleeplessness, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthma, epilepsy a terror of death which is worse than any of these, and which you perhaps have felt... Heaven only knows what the disease was of which you thought you had detected the symptoms. And you were not mistaken; they were there. Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. It will produce life-like imitations of the dilatations of dyspepsia, the sicknesses of pregnancy, the broken rhythm of the cardiac, the feverishness of the consumptive. If it is capable of deceiving the doctor how should it fail to deceive the patient? No, no; you mustn’t think I’m making fun of your sufferings. I should not undertake to heal them unless I understood them thoroughly. And, well, they say there’s no good confession unless it’s mutual. I have told you that without nervous trouble there can be no great artist. What is more,"..."there can be no great scientist either. I will go further, and say that, unless he himself is subject to nervous trouble, he is not, I won’t say a good doctor, but I do say the right doctor to treat nervous troubles. In nervous pathology a doctor who doesn’t say too many foolish things is a patient half-cured, just as a critic is a poet who has stopped writing verse and a policeman a burglar who has retired from practice.

Take this Hercules - this hero! hero, indeed! What was he but a large muscular creature of low intelligence and criminal tendencies! Poirot was reminded of one Adolfe Durand, a butcher who had been tried at Lyon in 1895 - a creature of oxlike strength who had killed several children. The defence had been epilepsy - from which he undoubtedly suffered - though whether grand mal or petit mal had been an argument of several days' discussion. This ancient Hercules probably suffered from grand mal. No, Poirot shook his head, if that was the Greeks' idea of a hero, then meassured by modern standards, it certainly would not do. The whole classical pattern shocked him. These gods and goddesses - they seemed to have as many different aliases as a modern criminal. indeed they seemed to be definitely criminal types, Drink, debauchery, incest, rape, homicide and chicanery - enought to keep a fuge d'Instruction constantly busy. No decent family life, No order, no method. even in their crimes, no order or method!

Aristotle, who lived from 384 to 322 BCE, concocted a climate theory to justify Greek superiority, saying that extreme hot or cold climates produced intellectually, physically, and morally inferior people who were ugly and lacked the capacity for freedom and self-government. Aristotle labeled Africans “burnt faces”—the original meaning in Greek of “Ethiopian”—and viewed the “ugly” extremes of pale or dark skins as the effect of the extreme cold or hot climates. All of this was in the interest of normalizing Greek slaveholding practices and Greece’s rule over the western Mediterranean. Aristotle situated the Greeks, in their supreme, intermediate climate, as the most beautifully endowed superior rulers and enslavers of the world. “Humanity is divided into two: the masters and the slaves; or, if one prefers it, the Greeks and the Barbarians, those who have the right to command; and those who are born to obey,” Aristotle said. For him, the enslaved peoples were “by nature incapable of reasoning and live a life of pure sensation, like certain tribes on the borders of the civilized world, or like people who are diseased through the onset of illnesses like epilepsy or madness.”4

But Shunt, he thirsted for understanding with obsessive perseverance. It was a pathology in this way, and pathologies aren't hobbies to be entertained through the inclination of the willing. With some assertion, you certainly can't direct a pathology: it directs, contorts, warps, wears you. Shunt walked through school, down his bedroom corridor, high-ceiling'd and close-panelled, over asphalt as hot as holiday sex, in his head, always relegated to a realm of internal mystery, a sphere of indecipherable symbols that were filtered in, held fast to, but never understood. He saw things or deduced things, and they were there for eternity. Once Shunt had them inside, it was impossible to divorce or expunge them, and so there they remained, infecting his peace and placidity of mind, thoughts like foreign bodies entering a gaping, unquenched wound, and after that Shunt's life devolved into the gangrene set in by these unpurged foreign bodies. Shunt suffered from epilepsy and a panic disorder. He didn't know who he was. He was not a funny person, a wise person, a valorous person, a soft person. Shunt was epilepsy and a panic disorder, and that's as encompassing as his personality had ever been. When you suffer a pathology it directs, contorts, warps, wears you.

Epsom Salt - Don't underestimate the powerful healing effects of regular Epsom salt.  Soaking in hot water infused with Epsom salts (magnesium sulfate) boosts blood levels of the ever important mineral magnesium, by as much as 35% in just 1 week.  Magnesium is a critical mineral that too many people are deficient in.  If you suffer from muscle tightness, stiffness, spasms, aches and pains, then buying Epsom salt in bulk and adding it to a hot bath 3 times a week, will bring magical relief to your discomfort.  The magnesium in Epsom salt will also bring much wanted relief to those who find themselves in a chronic state of tension, stress and anxiety.   The human body requires magnesium to manufacture the 2 enzymes quinone reductase, and glutathione S-transferase, both of which assist in neutralizing and eliminating chemical toxins.  Being deficient in magnesium, puts a significant damper on your body’s detoxification abilities. Magnesium also plays a critical role in regulating nerve and muscle activity, to help shield the body against the ravages and dangerous cumulative effects of stress.  Add 2-4 cups of pure Epsom salt to a hot bath several times a week, and see for yourself the incredible difference it makes.  Epsom salt baths can often turn even the most "bath-shy" guy, into a tub lover.   Most people can enjoy these detoxifying baths as often as they like.  The exception would be for those who suffer from any type of heart condition, epilepsy, narcolepsy, and pregnant women, all of whom, should only use bath therapy under the guidance and care of their health care provider.

The realization that there were electrical pathways connecting the brain to the body wasn’t systematically analyzed until the 1930s, when Dr. Wilder Penfield began working with epilepsy patients, who often suffered from debilitating convulsions and seizures that were potentially life-threatening. For them, the last option was to have brain surgery, which involved removing parts of the skull and exposing the brain. (Since the brain has no pain sensors, a person can be conscious during this entire procedure, so Dr. Penfield used only a local anesthetic during the operation.) Dr. Penfield noticed that when he stimulated certain parts of the cortex with an electrode, different parts of the body would respond. He suddenly realized that he could draw a rough one-to-one correspondence between specific regions of the cortex and the human body. His drawings were so accurate that they are still used today in almost unaltered form. They had an immediate impact on both the scientific community and the general public. In one diagram, you could see which region of the brain roughly controlled which function, and how important each function was. For example, because our hands and mouth are so vital for survival, a considerable amount of brain power is devoted to controlling them, while the sensors in our back hardly register at all. Furthermore, Penfield found that by stimulating parts of the temporal lobe, his patients suddenly relived long-forgotten memories in a crystal-clear fashion. He was shocked when a patient, in the middle of brain surgery, suddenly blurted out, “It was like … standing in the doorway at [my] high school.… I heard my mother talking on the phone, telling my aunt to come over that night.” Penfield realized that he was tapping into memories buried deep inside the brain. When he published his results in 1951, they created another transformation in our understanding of the brain.

Potassium Cyanide si hatari inapokuwa nje. Ni hatari inapojichanganya na asidi za tumboni ambapo hubadilika na kuwa gesi ya 'hydrogen cyanide'. Gesi ya 'hydrogen cyanide' ni miongoni mwa sumu hatari zaidi ulimwenguni. Mtu akimeza kidonge cha 'cyanide' atapata madhara makubwa. Kichwa chake kitamuuma hapohapo na atachanganyikiwa akili. Ngozi yake itakuwa nyekundu, kwa sababu damu yake itakuwa nyekundu zaidi – kutokana na kuzidi kwa oksijeni katika damu. Mwili hautakuwa na uwezo tena wa kuchukua oksijeni kutoka katika damu ili uitumie, kwa hiyo damu itazidi kuwa na oksijeni zaidi. Atapumua kwa shida. Mapafu yake yatafanya kazi vizuri lakini mwili wake hautakuwa na uwezo wa kutumia oksijeni yoyote – hivyo atadhani ana matatizo katika mfumo wake wa kupumua. Atazimia. Yaani, oksijeni haitafika kwenye ubongo. Atapata kifafa na atatapika nyongo. Ubongo wake utashindwa kufanya kazi na atakuwa mahututi ndani ya sekunde kumi! Baada ya hapo moyo wake utasimama kufanya kazi, na atafariki dunia.

From the story he told me, I pictured him among those bands of vagrants that in the years that followed I saw more and more often roaming about Europe: false monks, charlatans, swindlers, cheats, tramps and tatterdemalions, lepers and cripples, jugglers, invalid mercenaries, wandering Jews escaped from the infidels with their spirit broken, lunatics, fugitives under banishment, malefactors with an ear cut off, sodomites, and along with them ambulant artisans, weavers, tinkers, chair-menders, knife-grinders, basket-weavers, masons, and also rogues of every stripe, forgers, scoundrels, cardsharps, rascals, bullies, reprobates, recreants, frauds, hooligans, simoniacal and embezzling canons and priests, people who lived on the credulity of others, counterfeiters of bulls and papal seals, peddlers of indulgences, false paralytics who lay at church doors, vagrants fleeing from convents, relic-sellers, pardoners, soothsayers and fortunetellers, necromancers, healers, bogus alms-seekers, fornicators of every sort, corruptors of nuns and maidens by deception and violence, simulators of dropsy, epilepsy, hemorrhoids, gout, and sores, as well as melancholy madness. There were those who put plasters on their bodies to imitate incurable ulcerations, others who filled their mouths with a blood-colored substance to feign accesses of consumption, rascals who pretended to be weak in one of their limbs, carrying unnecessary crutches and imitating the falling sickness, scabies, buboes, swellings, while applying bandages, tincture of saffron, carrying irons on their hands, their heads swathed, slipping into the churches stinking, and suddenly fainting in the squares, spitting saliva and popping their eyes, making the nostrils spurt blood concocted of blackberry juice and vermilion, to wrest food or money from the frightened people who recalled the church fathers’ exhortations to give alms: Share your bread with the hungry, take the homeless to your hearth, we visit Christ, we house Christ, we clothe Christ, because as water purges fire so charity purges our sins.

This curious effect was noticed as far back as 1892, when textbooks on mental illness noted a link between “religious emotionalism” and epilepsy. It was first clinically described in 1975 by neurologist Norman Geschwind of Boston Veterans Administration Hospital. He noticed that epileptics who had electrical misfirings in their left temporal lobes often had religious experiences, and he speculated that the electrical storm in the brain somehow was the cause of these religious obsessions. Dr. V. S. Ramachandran estimates that 30 to 40 percent of all the temporal lobe epileptics whom he has seen suffer from hyperreligiosity. He notes, “Sometimes it’s a personal God, sometimes it’s a more diffuse feeling of being one with the cosmos. Everything seems suffused with meaning. The patient will say, ‘Finally, I see what it is all really about, Doctor. I really understand God. I understand my place in the universe—the cosmic scheme.’ ” He also notes that many of these individuals are extremely adamant and convincing in their beliefs. He says, “I sometimes wonder whether such patients who have temporal lobe epilepsy have access to another dimension of reality, a wormhole of sorts into a parallel universe. But I usually don’t say this to my colleagues, lest they doubt my sanity.” He has experimented on patients with temporal lobe epilepsy, and confirmed that these individuals had a strong emotional reaction to the word “God” but not to neutral words. This means that the link between hyperreligiosity and temporal lobe epilepsy is real, not just anecdotal. Psychologist Michael Persinger asserts that a certain type of transcranial electrical stimulation (called transcranial magnetic simulation, or TMS) can deliberately induce the effect of these epileptic lesions. If this is so, is it possible that magnetic fields can be used to alter one’s religious beliefs? In Dr. Persinger’s studies, the subject places a helmet on his head (dubbed the “God helmet”), which contains a device that can send magnetism into particular parts of the brain. Afterward, when the subject is interviewed, he will often claim that he was in the presence of some great spirit. David Biello, writing in Scientific American, says, “During the three-minute bursts of stimulation, the affected subjects translated this perception of the divine into their own cultural and religious language—terming it God, Buddha, a benevolent presence, or the wonder of the universe.” Since this effect is reproducible on demand, it indicates that perhaps the brain is hardwired in some way to respond to religious feelings.

To test these ideas, Dr. Mario Beauregard of the University of Montreal recruited a group of fifteen Carmelite nuns who agreed to put their heads into an MRI machine. To qualify for the experiment, all of them must “have had an experience of intense union with God.” Originally, Dr. Beauregard had hoped that the nuns would have a mystical communion with God, which could then be recorded by an MRI scan. However, being shoved into an MRI machine, where you are surrounded by tons of magnetic coils of wire and high-tech equipment, is not an ideal setting for a religious epiphany. The best they could do was to evoke memories of previous religious experiences. “God cannot be summoned at will,” explained one of the nuns. The final result was mixed and inconclusive, but several regions of the brain clearly lit up during this experiment: •  The caudate nucleus, which is involved with learning and possibly falling in love. (Perhaps the nuns were feeling the unconditional love of God?) •  The insula, which monitors body sensations and social emotions. (Perhaps the nuns were feeling close to the other nuns as they were reaching out to God?) •  The parietal lobe, which helps process spatial awareness. (Perhaps the nuns felt they were in the physical presence of God?) Dr. Beauregard had to admit that so many areas of the brain were activated, with so many different possible interpretations, that he could not say for sure whether hyperreligiosity could be induced. However, it was clear to him that the nuns’ religious feelings were reflected in their brain scans. But did this experiment shake the nuns’ belief in God? No. In fact, the nuns concluded that God placed this “radio” in the brain so that we could communicate with Him. Their conclusion was that God created humans to have this ability, so the brain has a divine antenna given to us by God so that we can feel His presence. David Biello concludes, “Although atheists might argue that finding spirituality in the brain implies that religion is nothing more than divine delusion, the nuns were thrilled by their brain scans for precisely the opposite reason: they seemed to provide confirmation of God’s interactions with them.” Dr. Beauregard concluded, “If you are an atheist and you live a certain kind of experience, you will relate it to the magnificence of the universe. If you are a Christian, you will associate it with God. Who knows. Perhaps they are the same thing.” Similarly, Dr. Richard Dawkins, a biologist at Oxford University and an outspoken atheist, was once placed in the God helmet to see if his religious beliefs would change. They did not. So in conclusion, although hyperreligiosity may be induced via temporal lobe epilepsy and even magnetic fields, there is no convincing evidence that magnetic fields can alter one’s religious views.

During the chaos of the Hundred Years’ War, when northern France was decimated by English troops and the French monarchy was in retreat, a young girl from Orléans claimed to have divine instructions to lead the French army to victory. With nothing to lose, Charles VII allowed her to command some of his troops. To everyone’s shock and wonder, she scored a series of triumphs over the English. News rapidly spread about this remarkable young girl. With each victory, her reputation began to grow, until she became a folk heroine, rallying the French around her. French troops, once on the verge of total collapse, scored decisive victories that paved the way for the coronation of the new king. However, she was betrayed and captured by the English. They realized what a threat she posed to them, since she was a potent symbol for the French and claimed guidance directly from God Himself, so they subjected her to a show trial. After an elaborate interrogation, she was found guilty of heresy and burned at the stake at the age of nineteen in 1431. In the centuries that followed, hundreds of attempts have been made to understand this remarkable teenager. Was she a prophet, a saint, or a madwoman? More recently, scientists have tried to use modern psychiatry and neuroscience to explain the lives of historical figures such as Joan of Arc. Few question her sincerity about claims of divine inspiration. But many scientists have written that she might have suffered from schizophrenia, since she heard voices. Others have disputed this fact, since the surviving records of her trial reveal a person of rational thought and speech. The English laid several theological traps for her. They asked, for example, if she was in God’s grace. If she answered yes, then she would be a heretic, since no one can know for certain if they are in God’s grace. If she said no, then she was confessing her guilt, and that she was a fraud. Either way, she would lose. In a response that stunned the audience, she answered, “If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.” The court notary, in the records, wrote, “Those who were interrogating her were stupefied.” In fact, the transcripts of her interrogation are so remarkable that George Bernard Shaw put literal translations of the court record in his play Saint Joan. More recently, another theory has emerged about this exceptional woman: perhaps she actually suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy. People who have this condition sometimes experience seizures, but some of them also experience a curious side effect that may shed some light on the structure of human beliefs. These patients suffer from “hyperreligiosity,” and can’t help thinking that there is a spirit or presence behind everything. Random events are never random, but have some deep religious significance. Some psychologists have speculated that a number of history’s prophets suffered from these temporal lobe epileptic lesions, since they were convinced they talked to God.

reveals the extent to which psychiatry is tightly tied to capitalistic corporate interests, how closely allied the field is with the major pharmaceutical houses, where millions, even billions, of dollars are made in mere months. This is why, although lithium had worked so well for so many people, drug developers set about discovering new mood stabilizers that had patent and profit possibilities, whipping up in their high-tech cauldrons scores of new pharmaceuticals to treat bipolar disorder or, better yet, converting already existing medications—drugs, say, for epilepsy—into treatments.

[She] personally tended the unhappy and impoverished victims of hunger and disease. I have often seen her washing wounds which others – even men – could hardly bear to look at ... She founded a hospital and gathered there the sufferers from the streets, and gave them all the attention of a nurse... How often she carried home, on her shoulders, the dirty and poor who were plagued with epilepsy! How she washed the pus from sores which others could not even behold.

All the greatest things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they and they only who have founded religions and created great works of art. Never will the world be conscious of how much it owes to them, nor above all of what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it. We enjoy fine music, beautiful pictures, a thousand exquisite things, but we do not know what they cost those who wrought them in sleeplessness, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthma, epilepsy.

You have to stop depending on your roommates. I want you to speak to the Swarthmore administration, the health center, and school security. If they know what’s going on and how to deal with it, you can go anywhere by yourself. So promise me you’ll speak to those people.” The thought terrified me, but I agreed. “You also need a doctor at the health center, and I want you to see a school psychologist, to help you handle the emotional challenges that come along with epilepsy.

...they seemed to accept things that to me were major catastrophes as part of the normal flow of life. For them, the crisis was the treatment, not the epilepsy.

Zeman, on the other hand, has concentrated his career on understanding the more bizarre disorders of consciousness, such as permanent déjà vu, that can occur as a result of epilepsy,