Temporal Lobe Quotes

I'm alone. And I'm crying. And no one is coming to the crib. And the nightlight has burned out. And I'm mad. I'm so mad. Left frontal lobe. I...I...I don't feel so good. Left occipital lobe. I... don't remember where...Left parietal lobe. I...I...I can't remember my name,but...but...Right temporal...but I'm still here. Right frontal. I'm still here... Right occipital.I'm still...Right parietal. I'm...Cerebellum. I'm...Thalamus. I...Hypothalamus. I...Hippocampus...Medulla........................

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.

The first shot causes warm rain to fall on Diana's arms from the sky. The second plants a mirrored jewel in the left temporal lobe of her brain…a place she could have named on a quiz but which now seems to be the place where the future is imagined, the place where what would have been is.

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.

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

The ‘secret’ of Shostakovich, it was suggested—by a Chinese neurologist, Dr Dajue Wang—was the presence of a metallic splinter, a mobile shell-fragment, in his brain, in the temporal horn of the left ventricle. Shostakovich was very reluctant, apparently, to have this removed: Since the fragment had been there, he said, each time he leaned his head to one side he could hear music. His head was filled with melodies—different each time—which he then made use of when composing. X-rays allegedly showed the fragment moving around when Shostakovich moved his head, pressing against his ‘musical’ temporal lobe, when he tilted, producing an infinity of melodies which his genius could use.

An unpopular apres-garde filmmaker (Watt) either suffers a temporal lobe seizure and becomes mute or else is the victim of everyone else’s delusion that his (Watt’s) temporal lobe seizure has left him mute.

It did something to the temporal lobe, one of the circuits involved in religious experience. It was supposed to put people closer to God. It did that. It also made them slaves.

It’s possible that the reason I've never experienced a ghostly presence is that my temporal lobes aren't wired for it. It could well be that the main difference between skeptics (Susan Blackmore notwithstanding) and believers is the neural structure they were born with. But the question still remains: Are these people whose EMF-influenced brains alert them to “presences” picking up something real that the rest of us can’t pick up, or are they hallucinating? Here again, we must end with the Big Shrug, a statue of which is being erected on the lawn outside my office.

for days or even weeks. It isn’t rare to find destructive, even criminal behavior. There’s such a big change, in fact, that two or three hundred years ago people with temporal lobe disorders were often considered to be possessed by

for days or even weeks. It isn’t rare to find destructive, even criminal behavior. There’s such a big change, in fact, that two or three hundred years ago people with temporal lobe disorders were often considered to be possessed by a

Today you meet more folks than your ancestors could imagine … some in passing. Some for a crucial instant. Others for tangled decades. Biology can’t keep up. Our overworked temporal lobes cannot “know” the face-name-reps of ten billion people!

He looked at the boy. You wont shoot, he said. That’s what you think. You aint got but two shells. Maybe just one. And they’ll hear the shot. Yes they will. But you wont. How do you figure that? Because the bullet travels faster than sound. It will be in your brain before you can hear it. To hear it you will need a frontal lobe and things with names like colliculus and temporal gyrus and you wont have them anymore. They’ll just be soup.

Idols of the injury, dug in behind the least understood motor plan information. The vile abomination temporal lobes and The four loathsome memory walls and The four reasoning, arithmetic beasts are found for all behind pain and planes. Portrayed as a house, Go in, function, cause blindness from The house's hearing spirit, judgment and The court's four bronze woes and The functioning brain lobe wings, Go in, hearing and perception, I dig under door fronts, pain and plans.

The hippocampus sits in the basement of the temporal lobe.

THE AMYGDALAfn8 IS the archetypal limbic structure, sitting under the cortex in the temporal lobe. It is central to mediating aggression, along with other behaviors that tell us tons about aggression.

Neuroscientist David Comings drew out the larger implications of such hallucinations for the relationship between our rational and spiritual brains: The psychedelic drugs like DMT often produce a sensation of “contact,” of being in the presence of and interaction with a non-human being. Highly intelligent and sophisticated test subjects who knew these feelings were drug-induced nevertheless insisted the contact had really happened. The temporal lobe-limbic system’s emotional tape recorder sometimes cannot distinguish between externally generated real events and internally generated non-real experience thus providing a system in which the rational brain and the spiritual brain are not necessarily in conflict.

Thus, an inhibition center developed below what in humans is the temporal lobe, to turn off much of the functioning of the reptilian brain; and an activation center evolved in the pons to turn on the R-complex, but harmlessly, during sleep.

While he attends to his rats, Persinger gives me the lowdown on the haunt theory. Why would a certain type of electromagnetic field make one hear things or sense a presence? What’s the mechanism? The answer hinges on the fact that exposure to electromagnetic fields lowers melatonin levels. Melatonin, he explains, is an anti-convulsive; if you have less of it in your system, your brain —in particular, your right temporal lobe— will be more prone to tiny epileptic-esque microseizures and the subtle hallucinations these seizures can cause.

Suppose you unexpectedly see a person you care about. Suddenly you feel the love you have, for that person. Let's follow the flow of information from the visual system through the brain to the point of the experience of love as best we can. First of all, the stimulus will flow from the visual system to the prefrontal cortex (putting an image of the loved one in working memory). The stimulus also reaches the explicit memory system of the temporal lobe and activates memories and integrates them with the image of the person. Simultaneously with these processes, the subcortical areas presumed to be involved in attachment will be activated (the exact paths by which the stimulus reaches these areas is not known, however). Activation of attachment circuits then impacts on working memory in several ways. One involves direct connections from the attachment areas to the prefrontal cortex (as with fear, it is the medial prefrontal region that is connected with subcortical attachment areas). Activation of attachment circuits also leads to activation of brain stem arousal networks, which then participate in the focusing of attention on the loved one by working memory. Bodily responses will also be initiated as outputs of attachment circuits, and contrast with the alarm responses initiated by fear and stress circuits. We approach rather than try to escape from or avoid the person, and these behavioral differences are accompanied by different physiological conditions within the body. This pattern of inputs to working memory from within the brain and from the body biases us more toward an open and accepting mode of processing than toward tension and vigilance. The net result in working memory is the feeling of love.

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).

the two halves of the fourth lobe: the temporal (as in the temples of your head). Not surprisingly, they handle the processing of sounds in general and the understanding of speech in particular.

different sets of facial muscles—and therefore produce different-looking smiles. This divergence explains the difference between genuine smiles and fakey, say-cheese smiles in photographs. People have trouble faking other genuine expressions, too, like fear, surprise, or an interest in someone’s pet stories. To overcome this limitation actors either drill with a mirror and practice conjuring up facial expressions à la Laurence Olivier, or, à la Constantin Stanislavsky, they inhabit the role and replicate the character’s internal feelings so closely that the right expressions emerge naturally.) The limbic system, and the temporal lobes generally, are also closely tied up with sex. Scientists discovered this connection in a roundabout way. In the mid-1930s a rogue biologist named Heinrich Klüver started some

We go to three parks. We walk nonstop or else she cries. The baby likes moving, especially moving at high speeds, so we go on swings. She opens one eye and looks at me with profound suspicion. What is this contraption? she asks silently, a tiny cyclops in my hands. This is a simple harmonic oscillator, I say, a pendulum; this is periodic motion. Wheeeee is the sound I think her temporal lobe wants to make" (p125)

When looking at the brains of injured patients, Paul Broca (1824–1880) discovered that the left temporal cortex was responsible for speech. When Penfield electrically stimulated the brains of patients undergoing surgery, he confirmed the function of speech was in the left temporal lobe. We know that the motor cortex lies at the front of the brain in a strip along the midline. Sensory processing from the skin lies just to the back of the

Historically, scientists had to rely on strokes or tumors to silence certain parts of the brain and hence determine what they do. But with the TES, one can harmlessly turn off or dampen parts of the brain at will. By shooting magnetic energy at a particular spot in the brain, one can determine its function by simply watching how a person’s behavior has changed. (For example, by shooting magnetic pulses into the left temporal lobe, one can see that this adversely affects our ability to talk.)

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.

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.

Moving on, while he wondered, the dark through which Mr. Lecky's light cut grew more beautiful with scents. Particles of solid matter so minute, gases so subtle, that they filtered through stopping and sealing, hung on the unstirred air. Drawn in with Mr. Lecky's breath came impalpable dews cooked out of disintegrating coal. Distilled, chemically split and reformed, they ended in flawless simulation of the aromas of gums, the scent of woods and the world's flowers. The chemists who made them could do more than that. Loose on the gloom were perfumes of flowers which might possibly have bloomed but never had, and the strong-smelling saps of trees either lost or not yet evolved. Mixed in the mucus of the pituitary membrane, these volatile essences meant more than synthetic chemistry to Mr. Lecky. Their microscopic slime coated the bushed-out ends of the olfactory nerve; their presence was signaled to the anterior of the brain's temporal lobe. At once, thought waited on them, tossing down from the great storehouse of old images, neglected ideas - sandalwood and roses, musk and lavender. Mr. Lecky stood still, wrung by pangs as insistent and unanswerable as hunger. He was prodded by the unrest of things desired, not had; the surfeit of things had, not desired. More than anything he could see, or words, or sounds, these odors made him stupidly aware of the past. Unable to remember it, whence he was, or where he had previously been, all that was sweet, impermanent and gone came back not spoiled by too much truth or exact memory. Volatile as the perfumes, the past stirred him with longing for what was not - the only beloved beauty which you will have to see but which you may not keep. Mr. Lecky's beam of light went through glass top and side of a counter, displayed bottles of colored liquid - straw, amber, topaz - threw shadows behind their diverse shapes. He had no use for perfume. All the distraction, all the sense of loss and implausible sweetness which he felt was in memory of women. Behind the counter, Mr. Lecky, curious, took out bottles, sniffed them, examined their elaborately varied forms - transparent squares, triangles, cones, flattened ovals. Some were opaque, jet or blue, rough with embedded metals in intricate design. This great and needless decoration of the flasks which contained it was one strange way to express the inexpressible. Another way was tried in the names put on the bottles. Here words ran the suggestive or symbolic gamut of idealized passion, or festive night, of desired caresses, or of abstractions of the painful allure yet farther fetched. Not even in the hopeful, miracle-raving fancy of those who used the perfumes could a bottle of liquid have any actual magic. Since the buyers at the counters must be human beings, nine of every ten were beyond this or other help. Women, young, but unlovely and unloved, women, whatever they had been, now at the end of it and ruined by years or thickened to caricature by fat, ought to be the ones called to mind by perfume. But they were not. Mr. Lecky held the bottle in his hand a long while, aware of the tenth woman.

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.

As a neuroscientist well into the fourth decade of my career, I’d looked at a lot of brain scans over the years, and these had been different. The brains belonging to these killers shared a rare and alarming pattern of low brain function in certain parts of the frontal and temporal lobes—areas commonly associated with self-control and empathy. This makes sense for those with a history of inhuman violence, since the reduction of activity in these regions suggests a lack of a normal sense of moral reasoning and of the ability to inhibit their impulses.

In 1861, just a year after Gage’s death, this view was further cemented through the work of Pierre Paul Broca, a physician in Paris who documented a patient who appeared normal except that he had a severe speech deficit. The patient could understand and comprehend speech perfectly, but he could utter only one sound, the word “tan.” After the patient died, Dr. Broca confirmed during the autopsy that the patient suffered from a lesion in his left temporal lobe, a region of the brain near his left ear. Dr. Broca would later confirm twelve similar cases of patients with damage to this specific area of the brain. Today patients who have damage to the temporal lobe, usually in the left hemisphere, are said to suffer from Broca’s aphasia. (In general, patients with this disorder can understand speech but cannot say anything, or else they drop many words when speaking.) Soon afterward, in 1874, German physician Carl Wernicke described patients who suffered from the opposite problem. They could articulate clearly, but they could not understand written or spoken speech. Often these patients could speak fluently with correct grammar and syntax, but with nonsensical words and meaningless jargon. Sadly, these patients often didn’t know they were spouting gibberish. Wernicke confirmed after performing autopsies that these patients had suffered damage to a slightly different area of the left temporal lobe.

In a nutshell, serotonin gives your neurons a thick skin, so they can withstand the pace of the bristling, bustling, neural metropolis. And then along comes a tiny army of LSD molecules, marching out of their Trojan Horse—a small purple tablet—and they look just like serotonin molecules. If you were a receptor site, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Through this insidious trickery, LSD molecules fool the receptors that normally suck up serotonin. They elbow serotonin out of the way and lodge themselves in these receptors instead. They do this in perceptual regions of the cortex, such as the occipital and temporal lobes, in charge of seeing and hearing, and in more cognitive zones, such as the prefrontal cortex, where conscious judgments take place. They do it in brain-stem nuclei that send their messages throughout the brain and body, felt as arousal and alertness. And once they’ve taken up their positions, Troy begins to fall. Not through force, as with the devastating blows of alcohol and dextromethorphan, but through passivity. Once encamped in their serotonin receptors, LSD molecules simply remain passive. They don’t inhibit, they don’t soothe, they don’t regulate, or filter, or modulate. They sit back with evil little grins and say, “It’s showtime! You just go ahead and fire as much as you like. You’re going to pick up a lot of channels you never got before. So have fun. And call me in about eight hours when my shift is over.

Using magnetoencephalography, a technique that measures the weak magnetic fields given off by a thinking brain, researchers have found that higher-rated chess players are more likely to engage the frontal and parietal cortices of the brain when they look at the board, which suggests that they are recalling information from long-term memory. Lower-ranked players are more likely to engage the medial temporal lobes, which suggests that they are encoding information. The experts are interpreting the present board in terms of their massive knowledge of past ones. The lower ranked players are seeing the board as something new...[de Groot] argued that expertise in the field of shoemaking, painting, building, or confectionary, is the result of the same accumulation of experiential linkings. According to Erikson, what we call expertise is really just vast amounts of knowledge, pattern-based retrieval, and planning mechanisms acquired over many years of experience in the associated domain. In other words, a great memory isn't just a byproduct of expertise; it is the essence of expertise. Whether we realize it or not, we are all like those chess masters and chicken sexers- interpreting the present in light of what we've learned in the past and letting our previous experiences shape not only how we perceive our world, but also the moves we end up making in it... Our memories are always with us, shaping and being shaped by the information flowing through our senses in a continuous feedback loop. Everything we see, hear, and smell is inflected by all the things we've seen, heard, and smelled in the past...Who we are and what we do is fundamentally a function of what we remember.

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.

Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, always curious about new phenomena, once placed himself in a sensory deprivation tank and tried to leave his physical body. He was successful. He would later write that he felt that he had left his body, drifted into space, and saw his motionless body when he looked back. However, Feynman later concluded that this was probably just his imagination, caused by sensory deprivation. Neurologists who have studied this phenomenon have a more prosaic explanation. Dr. Olaf Blanke and his colleagues in Switzerland may have located the precise place in the brain that generates out-of-body experiences. One of his patients was a forty-three-year-old woman who suffered from debilitating seizures that came from her right temporal lobe. A grid of about one hundred electrodes was placed over her brain in order to locate the region responsible for her seizures. When the electrodes stimulated the area between the parietal and temporal lobes, she immediately had the sensation of leaving her body. “I see myself lying in bed, from above, but I only see my legs and lower trunk!” she exclaimed. She felt she was floating six feet above her body. When the electrodes were turned off, however, the out-of-body sensation disappeared immediately. In fact, Dr. Blanke found that he could turn the out-of-body sensation on and off, like a light switch, by repeatedly stimulating this area of the brain. As we saw in Chapter 9, temporal lobe epileptic lesions can induce the feeling that there are evil spirits behind every misfortune, so the concept of spirits leaving the body is perhaps part of our neural makeup. (This may also explain the presence of supernatural beings. When Dr. Blanke analyzed a twenty-two-year-old woman who was suffering from intractable seizures, he found that, by stimulating the temporoparietal area of the brain, he could induce the sensation that there was a shadowy presence behind her. She could describe this person, who even grabbed her arms, in detail. His position would change with each appearance, but he would always appear behind her.)

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.

Recently, brain scans of schizophrenics taken while they were having auditory hallucinations have helped explain this ancient disorder. For example, when we silently talk to ourselves, certain parts of the brain light up on an MRI scan, especially in the temporal lobe (such as in Wernicke’s area). When a schizophrenic hears voices, the very same areas of the brain light up. The brain works hard to construct a consistent narrative, so schizophrenics try to make sense of these unauthorized voices, believing they originate from strange sources, such as Martians secretly beaming thoughts into their brains. Dr. Michael Sweeney of Ohio State writes, “Neurons wired for the sensation of sound fire on their own, like gas-soaked rags igniting spontaneously in a hot, dark garage. In the absence of sights and sounds in the surrounding environment, the schizophrenic’s brain creates a powerful illusion of reality.” Notably, these voices seem to be coming from a third party, who often gives the subject commands, which are mostly mundane but sometimes violent. Meanwhile, the simulation centers in the prefrontal cortex seem to be on automatic pilot, so in a way it’s as though the consciousness of a schizophrenic is running the same sort of simulations we all do, except they’re done without his permission. The person is literally talking to himself without his knowledge. HALLUCINATIONS The mind constantly generates hallucinations of its own, but for the most part they are easily controlled. We see images that don’t exist or hear spurious sounds, for example, so the anterior cingulate cortex is vital to distinguish the real from the manufactured. This part of the brain helps us distinguish between stimuli that are external and those that are internally generated by the mind itself. However, in schizophrenics, it is believed that this system is damaged, so that the person cannot distinguish real from imaginary voices. (The anterior cingulate cortex is vital because it lies in a strategic place, between the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system. The link between these two areas is one of the most important in the brain, since one area governs rational thinking, and the other emotions.) Hallucinations, to some extent, can be created on demand. Hallucinations occur naturally if you place someone in a pitch-black room, an isolation chamber, or a creepy environment with strange noises. These are examples of “our eyes playing tricks on us.” Actually, the brain is tricking itself, internally creating false images, trying to make sense of the world and identify threats. This effect is called “pareidolia.” Every time we look at clouds in the sky, we see images of animals, people, or our favorite cartoon characters. We have no choice. It is hardwired into our brains. In a sense, all images we see, both real and virtual, are hallucinations, because the brain is constantly creating false images to “fill in the gaps.” As we’ve seen, even real images are partly manufactured. But in the mentally ill, regions of the brain such as the anterior cingulate cortex are perhaps damaged, so the brain confuses reality and fantasy.

Another common form of mental illness is bipolar disorder, in which a person suffers from extreme bouts of wild, delusional optimism, followed by a crash and then periods of deep depression. Bipolar disorder also seems to run in families and, curiously, strikes frequently in artists; perhaps their great works of art were created during bursts of creativity and optimism. A list of creative people who were afflicted by bipolar disorder reads like a Who’s Who of Hollywood celebrities, musicians, artists, and writers. Although the drug lithium seems to control many of the symptoms of bipolar disorder, the causes are not entirely clear. One theory states that bipolar disorder may be caused by an imbalance between the left and right hemispheres. Dr. Michael Sweeney notes, “Brain scans have led researchers to generally assign negative emotions such as sadness to the right hemisphere and positive emotions such as joy to the left hemisphere. For at least a century, neuroscientists have noticed a link between damage to the brain’s left hemisphere and negative moods, including depression and uncontrollable crying. Damage to the right, however, has been associated with a broad array of positive emotions.” So the left hemisphere, which is analytical and controls language, tends to become manic if left to itself. The right hemisphere, on the contrary, is holistic and tends to check this mania. Dr. V. S. Ramachandran writes, “If left unchecked, the left hemisphere would likely render a person delusional or manic.… So it seems reasonable to postulate a ‘devil’s advocate’ in the right hemisphere that allows ‘you’ to adopt a detached, objective (allocentric) view of yourself.” If human consciousness involves simulating the future, it has to compute the outcomes of future events with certain probabilities. It needs, therefore, a delicate balance between optimism and pessimism to estimate the chances of success or failures for certain courses of action. But in some sense, depression is the price we pay for being able to simulate the future. Our consciousness has the ability to conjure up all sorts of horrific outcomes for the future, and is therefore aware of all the bad things that could happen, even if they are not realistic. It is hard to verify many of these theories, since brain scans of people who are clinically depressed indicate that many brain areas are affected. It is difficult to pinpoint the source of the problem, but among the clinically depressed, activity in the parietal and temporal lobes seems to be suppressed, perhaps indicating that the person is withdrawn from the outside world and living in their own internal world. In particular, the ventromedial cortex seems to play an important role. This area apparently creates the feeling that there is a sense of meaning and wholeness to the world, so that everything seems to have a purpose. Overactivity in this area can cause mania, in which people think they are omnipotent. Underactivity in this area is associated with depression and the feeling that life is pointless. So it is possible that a defect in this area may be responsible for some mood swings.

For instance, emotional memories are stored in the amygdala, but words are recorded in the temporal lobe. Meanwhile, colors and other visual information are collected in the occipital lobe, and the sense of touch and movement reside in the parietal lobe. So far, scientists have identified more than twenty categories of memories that are stored in different parts of the brain, including fruits and vegetables, plants, animals, body parts, colors, numbers, letters, nouns, verbs, proper names, faces, facial expressions, and various emotions and sounds. Figure 11. This shows the path taken to create memories. Impulses from the senses pass through the brain stem, to the thalamus, out to the various cortices, and then to the prefrontal cortex. They then pass to the hippocampus to form long-term memories. (illustration credit 5.1) A single memory—for instance, a walk in the park—involves information that is broken down and stored in various regions of the brain, but reliving just one aspect of the memory (e.g., the smell of freshly cut grass) can suddenly send the brain racing to pull the fragments together to form a cohesive recollection. The ultimate goal of memory research is, then, to figure out how these scattered fragments are somehow reassembled when we recall an experience. This is called the “binding problem,” and a solution could potentially explain many puzzling aspects of memory. For instance, Dr. Antonio Damasio has analyzed stroke patients who are incapable of identifying a single category, even though they are able to recall everything else. This is because the stroke has affected just one particular area of the brain, where that certain category was stored. The binding problem is further complicated because all our memories and experiences are highly personal. Memories might be customized for the individual, so that the categories of memories for one person may not correlate with the categories of memories for another. Wine tasters, for example, may have many categories for labeling subtle variations in taste, while physicists may have other categories for certain equations. Categories, after all, are by-products of experience, and different people may therefore have different categories. One novel solution to the binding problem uses the fact that there are electromagnetic vibrations oscillating across the entire brain at roughly forty cycles per second, which can be picked up by EEG scans. One fragment of memory might vibrate at a very precise frequency and stimulate another fragment of memory stored in a distant part of the brain. Previously it was thought that memories might be stored physically close to one another, but this new theory says that memories are not linked spatially but rather temporally, by vibrating in unison. If this theory holds up, it means that there are electromagnetic vibrations constantly flowing through the entire brain, linking up different regions and thereby re-creating entire memories. Hence the constant flow of information between the hippocampus, the prefrontal cortex, the thalamus, and the different cortices might not be entirely neural after all. Some of this flow may be in the form of resonance across different brain structures.

When applied to the prefrontal lobes, TMS has been shown to enhance the speed and agility of cognitive processing. The TMS bursts are like a localized jolt of caffeine, but nobody knows for sure how the magnets actually do their work.” These experiments hint, but by no means prove, that silencing a part of the left frontotemporal region could initiate some enhanced skills. These skills are a far cry from savant abilities, and we should also be careful to point out that other groups have looked into these experiments, and the results have been inconclusive. More experimental work must be done, so it is still too early to render a final judgment one way or the other. TMS probes are the easiest and most convenient instrument to use for this purpose, since they can selectively silence various parts of the brain at will without relying on brain damage and traumatic accidents. But it should also be noted that TMS probes are still crude, silencing millions of neurons at a time. Magnetic fields, unlike electrical probes, are not precise but spread out over several centimeters. We know that the left anterior temporal and orbitofrontal cortices are damaged in savants and likely responsible, at least in some part, for their unique abilities, but perhaps the specific area that must be dampened is an even smaller subregion. So each jolt of TMS might inadvertently deactivate some of the areas that need to remain intact in order to produce savantlike skills. In the future, with TMS probes we might be able to narrow down the region of the brain involved with eliciting savant skills. Once this region is identified, the next step would be to use highly accurate electrical probes, like those used in deep brain stimulation, to dampen these areas even more precisely. Then, with the push of a button, it might be possible to use these probes to silence this tiny portion of the brain in order to bring out savantlike skills. FORGETTING TO FORGET AND PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY Although savant skills may be initiated by some sort of injury to the left brain (leading to right brain compensation), this still does not explain precisely how the right brain can perform these miraculous feats of memory. By what neural mechanism does photographic memory emerge? The answer to this question may determine whether we can become savants. Until recently, it was thought that photographic memory was due to the special ability of certain brains to remember. If so, then it might be difficult for the average person to learn these memory skills, since only exceptional brains are capable of them. But in 2012, a new study showed that precisely the opposite may be true. The key to photographic memory may not be the ability of remarkable brains to learn; on the contrary, it may be their inability to forget. If this is true, then perhaps photographic memory is not such a mysterious thing after all.

Feelings of suspicion—sometimes rising to the level of paranoia—can be a symptom of many types of mental illness, including Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s patients may accuse their romantic partners of cheating on them or their caretakers of stealing property or trying to harm or even kill them. While neuroscientists don’t really understand the networks or parts of the brain related to paranoia, in some cases this condition is attributed to temporal lobe damage.

Visual agnosia is the inability of the brain to make sense of or make use of some part of an otherwise normal visual stimulus and is typified by the inability to recognize familiar objects or faces. This is distinct from blindness, which is a lack of sensory input to the brain due to damage to the eye, optic nerve, or the primary visual cortex. Visual agnosia is often due to stroke affecting the posterior occipital and/or temporal lobe(s) in the brain. The specific dysfunctions vary depending on the type of agnosia. Some sufferers are unable to copy drawings but are able to manipulate objects with good dexterity. Commonly, patients can name the object, here a tea cup, categorize it, but cannot describe its function; or the reverse, be able to drink from it appropriately but not know its name or describe its uses. Lesion studies clearly demonstrate that even crystallized objects, your left foot, or here a tea cup, are not “things” in long-term memory but are concepts constructed from multiple brain modules at the moment of perception (Farah, 1999).

It was far from clear what had caused this rage, whether it was an eruption of epileptic violence (such as one may see, on rare occasions, with very severe temporal-lobe seizures), or whether it was, in the simplistic terms of his admission note, simply 'a psychosis', or whether it represented some final, desperate call for help, from a tortured soul who was mute and had no direct way of expressing his predicament, his needs.

People with temporal-lobe epilepsy report déjà vu, unexplained panic states, strong smells, and even a preoccupation with philosophical and cosmic concerns. They also sometimes report vivid hallucinatory journeys.

It could easily be that the visitors are affecting the temporal lobe in such a way as to induce abnormalities that would later be diagnosed as epileptic conditions.

Thus higher-order memorization is a multistage process, involving the transfer of perceptions, or perceptual syntheses, from short-term to long-term memory. It is just such a transfer that fails to occur in people with temporal lobe damage.

levels SUPPLEMENTS GABA, B6, magnesium MEDICATIONS Anticonvulsants, such as Topamax, Neurontin TYPE 6. Temporal Lobe Addicts SYMPTOMS Temper problems, mood instability, memory problems, learning disabilities BRAIN FINDINGS/NEURO-TRANSMITTER ISSUE Abnormal TL SUPPLEMENTS GABA, B6, magnesium for calming, or

When someone advances an idea inconsistent with our own worldview, we don’t just disagree—we start painting a mental picture of the person we oppose as somehow deficient, all higgledy-piggledy in the temporal lobes, perhaps, or just an outright villain.

The most interesting finding appeared when we subdivided the dog and human scents into their subcategories of familiar and unfamiliar. One, and only one, type of smell activated the caudate: familiar human. This was especially true for Callie. In her case, the familiar human was Kat. Kat’s sweat activated Callie’s caudate—same as the signal for hot dogs. But Kat wasn’t even at the scanner. This meant that Callie had identified the scent as Kat even though she wasn’t physically present. And if Callie had a mental category for Kat that didn’t require her physical presence, then this suggested that Callie had a sense of permanence for the people in her household. She knew who her family was, and she remembered them. We found further evidence for this interpretation in an area called the inferior temporal lobe. This part of the brain is closely associated with memory function, and like the caudate, the inferior temporal lobe was strongly activated by the smell of a familiar human. The inferior temporal activation told us that the dogs remembered their human family, and the caudate activation, more prominent in Callie, told us that her remembrance of Kat was a positive one. Could it be longing? Or love? It seemed entirely possible. These patterns of brain activation looked strikingly similar to those observed when humans are shown pictures of people they love.

brain scan would show us that a solution has been reached approximately three hundred milliseconds before the solver realizes it himself. Specifically, we would see a burst of activity from the right anterior temporal lobe (an area just above his right ear that is implicated in complex cognitive processing), and an increased activation in the right anterior superior

Just as episodic memory depends on semantic memory, semantic and episodic memory both depend on implicit memory.29 For example, each time we consciously recognize a stimulus, we are drawing upon implicit processes operating in the medial temporal lobe memory system. Sensory cues that activate elements of a memory are stored via the medial temporal lobe system; then, through a process known as pattern completion,30 a memory is assembled in a way that can be retrieved into working memory, where it can be consciously experienced. Although the result is a conscious memory, the processes that package it in such a way to allow it to become conscious content are not consciously accessible. Recall

third-person’ information is required to make a judgment (such as knowledge about mental state categories, scene construction, etc.), whereas a more ventral ‘mentalizing’ subnetwork appears to be relatively more engaged when more embodied, ‘first-person’ information is required to make a judgment (e.g., bodily sensations or feelings related to homeostasis), referred to as the ‘dorsomedial’ and ‘medial temporal lobe’ subnetworks, respectively

In one marijuana experience, my informant became aware of the presence and, in a strange way, the in-appropriateness of this silent "watcher," who responds with interest and occasional critical comment to the kaleidoscopic dream imagery of the marijuana experience but is not part of it. "Who are you?" my informant silently asked it. "Who wants to know?" it replied, making the experience very like a Sufi or Zen parable. But my informant's question is a deep one. I would suggest the observer is a small part of the critical faculties of the left hemisphere, functioning much more in psychedelic than in dream experiences, but present to a degree in both. However, the ancient query, "Who is it who asks the question?" is still unanswered; perhaps it is another component of the left cerebral hemisphere. An asymmetry in the temporal lobes

Suffering is not in vain, yet human hands, you prevent me from reaching heights unknown to man. Red knuckled and angry, I punch both fists through clouds reaching heaven. I stumble, only a short distance, as my temporal lobes birth supernovas. When I stand my back straight, massive holes adorn the sky, all that had been hidden, now in sight. My eyes, were wide open, shut.

Neurophysiological explanations include sleep paralysis and temporal lobe epilepsy (Spanos et al. 1993; Persinger 1992; Blackmore 1994), but researchers exploring these possibilities have either failed to find such pathology among abduction experiencers or have chosen to overlook important aspects of the phenomenon. For example, many abduction experiences occur under conditions that do not appear to be associated with sleep. Second, abduction experiences are often corroborated by independent UFO sightings or physical evidence. Third, neurophysiological explanations do not account for hyperarousal and anxiety triggered by certain events or images symbolically linked to abduction.

Brain surgeons have discovered that stimulating the temporal lobe during surgery in alert patients can elicit intensely spiritual emotions even in self-described atheists.34

He had a headache, nothing new there, but this one was something special, a vise grip across his temporal lobes that made him feel like he’d been gassed with some kind of low-grade neurotoxin in his sleep. The greasy smear of breakfast down the back of his throat hadn’t helped.

That I-me-mine self is constructed largely in and by the brain’s medial prefrontal cortex. It’s assisted by the medial temporal lobe, the parietal lobe, and the PCC of which we’ll hear more in Chapter 3. This brain network allows us to do things that other animals cannot. We can compose music and calculate math. We have a sense of time that includes past and future, allowing us to delay gratification to meet our goals. We are able to contemplate the very nature of consciousness, using the brain to think about our thoughts. Yet consciousness is always turned on. Whether we’re focusing on a task using the TPN or listening to the rambling of the demon, the engine is running at 2,000 RPM. There’s no easy way of shutting off our thoughts, of getting outside the self. In his book The Curse of Self, psychologist Mark Leary of Duke University shows the many downsides of this perpetual self-awareness. He shows that it leads to many forms of suffering, including “depression, anxiety, anger, jealousy, and other negative emotions.” He concludes that self-awareness is “single-handedly responsible for many, if not most of the problems that human beings face as individuals and as a species.” We can summarize this state in a single word: “selfing.” Meditation quiets self-awareness and gives us relief from selfing. In experienced meditators, the “self” parts of the prefrontal cortex go offline. The jargon for this is “hypofrontality.” Hypo is the opposite of hyper, and hypofrontality means the shutting down of the brain’s frontal lobes. The inner critic shuts up. The negative self-talk about “who I am” and “what I do” and “what other people think of me” ceases. We quit selfing. This gives us a sense of identity beyond the suffering self and all the roles it plays. Psychologist Robert Kegan is the former head of adult psychology at Harvard University. He calls the transcendence of selfing the “subject-object shift.” In altered states, we get out of the subjective selves we normally think we are. To be objective, you can’t be the object you’re contemplating. So when the brain enters a state of hypofrontality and we’re no longer enmeshed in the local self, we gain perspective on it. We realize we’re more than that. To realize it’s an object we’re observing, we have to step out of the suffering self. We see the demon from a distance as we step into an identity that is vastly greater than the one we previously inhabited. 2.8. When we make the subject-object shift we escape the limitations of the finite self. Kegan believes that making this jump is the most powerful way to facilitate personal transformation. He says that after it makes the subject-object shift, “the self is more about movement through different states of consciousness than about defending and identifying with any one form.

One of the first structures to deteriorate in Alzheimer’s is the hippocampus, a centre of grey matter in the temporal lobe of the brain, located on either side next to the ears. The hippocampus is active in memory formation and has an important function in stress regulation. It is well known that chronically high levels of the stress hormone cortisol can shrink the hippocampus.

It is all too apparent: wounds never heal, but rather, in a torpid state deep inside the medial temporal lobe of the brain, grief waits for fresh release.

had just accomplished, we controlled the visual channel by the hand signals we gave, and we controlled smell and taste by giving either peas or hot dogs. Outputs are also easy to understand, especially if we consider movement as the main output of the brain. The earliest fMRI experiments had human subjects lying in the MRI and tapping their fingers for periods of thirty seconds. When the subjects tapped their fingers, activity in the part of the brain that controlled the hand was plainly visible. The central sulcus is a groove in the human brain that runs almost vertically down the outside of each hemisphere. Everything behind the central sulcus is broadly concerned with inputs and everything in front with outputs. It is a defining landmark that divides the frontal lobe in front of the groove from the parietal lobe behind. The frontal bank of the central sulcus, it’s important to note, contains the neurons that control movement of all the parts of the body. Toward the bottom of this groove, above the ear, we find neurons that control the hand and mouth, and as we move up toward the crown of the head, we find neurons that control the legs. The neurons found along the sulcus control the opposite side of the body. When you move your right hand, a portion of the left central sulcus will become active, and this can be seen easily with fMRI. In contrast, the neurons behind the central sulcus respond when the corresponding parts of the body are touched. These are the primary sensory neurons. As you move farther toward the back of the head, the functions of the neurons become multimodal, meaning they integrate the inputs from many senses. At the very back of the head, we find the primary visual area, which receives inputs from the eyes. Another obvious landmark of the human brain is the protuberance along the sides of the brain, just above the ear. This is the temporal lobe. Sitting directly next to the ear, parts of the temporal lobe are concerned with hearing. Other parts of the temporal lobe, along the inner crease next to the rest of the brain, contain structures critical for memory. With the dog brain, the first thing you notice is that, apart from being smaller, it has a lot fewer folds. The massive amount of folding in the human brain is the solution that evolved to cram more brain into a small space. If you could flatten out the brain, you would find that all the neurons are contained in a thin sheet just a few millimeters thick.

People, on the other hand, defensively clung to their need to be right no matter how flawed their thinking. “Consciousness enabled by our particularly well-developed brains is what sets us apart,”he managed. He continued with a little more confidence. “Homo sapiens have a uniquely evolved neocortex, prefrontal cortex, and temporal lobes that make us capable of abstract thought, language, problem solving, and introspection.”“Our awareness makes us human then?”“No. It’s not simply a matter of passive awareness. Even slugs and plants have a level of sentience. It’s our ability to harness the power of our minds to gather knowledge, organize it into something relevant, and advance to a more evolved state. Our thoughts are the gateway. We think, therefore, we are.”“And how can we trust our thoughts?”“It’s a matter of intelligence and careful observation. You said yourself that ours is a universe of observable phenomena. The only barrier to apprehending the truth is our own unwillingness to see the world as it is instead of how we prefer it to be.”The professor’s lips nudged into a smile. “Perhaps. Well said, Mr. Hartt.”He turned toward the class. “Our time’s up today. For next class, please read chapters twenty through forty-five. And”—he glanced up at Austin—“be sure to arrive on time for the discussion.”Austin nodded as he stood. “Mr. Hartt, a word with you please?”Dr. Riley said, stuffing his papers into a leather briefcase

This second wave of synaptogenesis is not confined to the frontal lobes. When the UCLA team scanned the brains of nineteen normal children and adolescents, ages seven and sixteen, they found that the parietal lobes (which integrate information from far-flung neighborhoods of the brain, such as auditory, tactile, and visual signals) are still maturing through the midteens. The long nerve fibers called white matter are probably still being sheathed in myelin, the fatty substance that lets nerves transmit signals faster and more efficiently. As a result, circuits that make sense of disparate information are works in progress through age sixteen or so. The parietal lobes reach their gray matter peak at age ten (in girls) or twelve (in boys) and are then pruned. But the temporal lobes, seats of language as well as emotional control, do not reach their gray matter maximum until age sixteen, Giedd finds. Only then do they undergo pruning. The teen brain, it seems, reprises one of the most momentous acts of infancy, the overproduction and then pruning of neuronal branches. “The brain,” says Sowell, “undergoes dynamic changes much later than we originally thought.

Autistic savants tend to have left-brain dysfunction coupled with right-brain compensation, and this has led numerous research groups to wonder if sabotaging a portion of the left brain might grant savant-like abilities. Numerous experimenters, but most especially neurobiologist Allan Snyder at the University of Sydney in Australia, have used magnetic pulses to temporarily disable the left anterior temporal lobe of the brain in ordinary people before giving them specific tasks.8 In one case, participants were given a minute to draw a horse, dog, or face. In others, they were given challenging proofreading or number-estimation tasks after being exposed to the magnetic pulse. In all experiments, a portion of the participants showed dramatic improvements.9 After one drawing experiment, one man could not believe that the highly accurate drawings were his own. Yet the effects were not universal; savantlike skills were not induced in everyone. Nobody knows why. That’s obviously worth looking into, but even more intriguing is what happens to these superhuman abilities when autism is ultimately cured.

But what actually happens in this flashbulb moment? How does a flashbulb moment seem to collide with a long exposure, something that we know to be impossible? Two small portions of our brain known as the amygdalae – groups of hyper-responsive nerve bundles in the temporal lobe concerned primarily with memory and decision-making – commandeer the rest of the brain’s functions to react in a crisis. It is something that seems to stretch a one-second fall to five seconds or more, set off by fear and sudden shocks that hit our limbic system so hard that we may never forget them. But our perceived duration distortion is just that; clock time has not in fact offered to pause or elongate for us. Instead, the amygdalae have laid down memories with far more vivid detail, and the time distortion we perceive has just happened in retrospect. The neuroscientist David Eagleman, who has conducted many experiments into time perception and as a boy experienced a similar elongation of time when he fell off a roof, explains it in terms of ‘a trick of the memory writing a story of a reality’. Our neural mechanisms are constantly attempting to calibrate the world around us into an accessible narrative in as little time as possible. Authors attempt to do the same, for what is fiction if not time repositioned, and what is history if not time in retrospect, events re-evaluated in our own time?

He theorized three things were necessary for a subject to become a serial killer. One, an aggressive gene he called the warrior gene. Two, inactivity or damage or malfunctioning of the temporal and frontal lobes, which could be determined in a functional MRI. And three, early abuse that took place right after birth.

the enhancement of evoked potentials spread forward into the left temporal lobe, which is normally regarded as purely auditory in function. This is a very remarkable and, one suspects, fundamental finding, for it suggests that what are normally auditory areas are being reallocated,

The cerebral cortex is the largest part of our brain, where the majority of our complex thinking, short-term memory, and sensory stimulation take place. It is made up of the occipital, parietal, temporal, and frontal lobes. Our frontal lobes are where most of our thinking takes place: where logic and creativity derive.

In our neurofeedback lab we see individuals with long histories of traumatic stress who have only partially responded to existing treatments. Their qEEGs show a variety of different patterns. Often there is excessive activity in the right temporal lobe, the fear center of the brain, combined with too much frontal slow-wave activity. This means that their hyperaroused emotional brains dominate their mental life. Our research showed that calming the fear center decreases trauma-based problems and improves executive functioning

He spent that September refining a pitch for a Panama hat-like temporal lobe stimulation device and tried to raise some venture capital, but he was met with nothing but rejection. They laughed at him, and not because he wanted them to.

Not bad as a skeptic's schematic of 2-3-74. A standard psychiatric textbook includes the following as behavioral traits of patients suffering from temporal lobe seizures: Hypergraphia is an obsessional phenomenon manifested by writing extensive notes and diaries. [...] The intense emotions are often labile, so that the patient may exhibit great warmth at one time, whereas, at another time, anger and irritability may evolve to rage and aggressive behavior. [.] Suspiciousness may extend to paranoia, and a sense of helplessness may lead to passive dependency. ~. . .] Religious beliefs not only are intense, but may also be associated with elaborate theological or cosmological theories. Patients may believe that they have special divine guidance. [. ]

For those yearning for a diagnosis to slap onto 2-3-74, good news: Temporal lobe epilepsy can induce seizures that are neither disabling nor obvious for purposes of medical diagnosis or the individual's own sense of something amiss. It can't be disproven that Phil may have had such seizures during 2-3-74-or other times throughout his life. And if he did, everything is explained-from the Al Voice to the endless Exegesis. Consider this eerily on-the-money description from a medical study: Such

At the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience in Lausanne, Switzerland, scientists have been studying the link between mystical experiences and cognitive neuroscience. They point out that the fundamental revelations to the founders of the three monotheistic religions—Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed—occurred on mountains, and included such components as feeling a presence, seeing a figure, hearing voices, and seeing lights. These similarities of experience suggest to the scientists that exposure to altitude might affect functions relying on brain areas such as the temporoparietal junction and the prefrontal cortex. Prolonged stays at high altitude, especially when linked to social deprivation, can lead to prefrontal lobe dysfunctions, which are commonly found during ecstatic experiences. Also, the physical and emotional stresses of climbing at altitude release endorphins, which are known to lower the threshold for temporal lobe epilepsy, which in turn might evoke such experiences. All such phenomena, then, might relate to “abnormal body processing.

The neural-channeling devices attached to your head allow access to the temporal lobe . . . you can have anything you’d like. You have but to imagine it. This is, for the time being, your Elysian Fields. Endorphins and oxytocins, the psychological roots for contentment and pleasure, are released in any manner of ways: drink, drugs, pain, exercise or . . . orgasm.

Temporal lobe lesions can flip people’s sexual orientations from gay to straight (or vice versa), or redirect their sexual appetites toward inappropriate things: common side effects of Klüver-Bucy include zoophilia, coprophilia, pedophilia, and -philias so idiosyncratic they don’t have names.

Kirk Erickson and colleagues in Art Kramer’s lab hypothesized that the well-documented shrinkage of the brain with age would be reduced by exercise. They used structural scans to measure hippocampal volume in 165 healthy older people who varied in their level of physical fitness. The hippocampus is a structure deep in the temporal lobes long known to be critical for forming new memories. They found that people who showed higher aerobic fitness had larger hippocampi bilaterally. Moreover, the fitter group also showed better spatial memory performance than the less fit group.

Along with the violent tonic-clonic seizure, it turned out I had also been experiencing complex partial seizures because of overstimulation in my temporal lobes, generally considered to be the most “ticklish” part of the brain. The temporal lobe houses the ancient structures of the hippocampus and the amygdala, the parts of the brain responsible for emotion and memory. The symptoms from this type of seizure can range from a “Christmas morning” feeling of euphoria to sexual arousal to religious experiences.

complex partial seizures because of overstimulation in my temporal lobes, generally considered to be the most “ticklish” part of the brain. The temporal lobe houses the ancient structures of the hippocampus and the amygdala, the parts of the brain responsible for emotion and memory.

my temporal lobes, generally considered to be the most “ticklish” part of the brain.5 The temporal lobe houses the ancient structures of the hippocampus and the amygdala, the parts of the brain responsible for emotion and memory. The

my temporal lobes, generally considered to be the most “ticklish” part of the brain.5 The temporal lobe houses the ancient structures of the hippocampus and the amygdala, the parts of the brain responsible for emotion and memory. The symptoms from this type of seizure can range from a “Christmas morning” feeling of euphoria to sexual arousal to religious experiences.67 Often people report feeling déjà vu and its opposite, something called jamais vu, when everything seems unfamiliar, such as my feeling of alienation in the office bathroom; seeing halos of light or viewing the world as if it is bizarrely out of proportion (known as the Alice in Wonderland effect), which is what was happening while I was on my way to interview John Walsh; and experiencing photophobia, an extreme sensitivity to light, like my visions in Times Square. These are all common symptoms or precedents of temporal lobe seizures. A small subset of those with temporal lobe epilepsy—about 5 to 6 percent—report an out-of-body experience, a feeling described as being removed from your body and able to look at yourself, usually from above.