Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [145]
“How many of those people actually had epilepsy?” I asked him. “Zero,” he said. “I looked up the literature and very carefully reviewed the history of those people and found that none of them had epilepsy.” Some were diagnosed for silly reasons: one person had a “fit of spleen,” which meant he was irritable, not epileptic. Martin Luther was taken into custody by the Catholic Church, and the phrase “Martin Luther’s seizure” became his ticket to the annals of brain disorder. For others, Hughes said, the diagnosis did not match the symptoms. For example, Joan of Arc’s visions stretched on for hours. Seizures last a couple of minutes.
Of course, Hughes’s analysis has no more empirical heft than does that of neurologists who attribute religious fervor to complex partial seizures. His theory cannot be tested, either, since Moses and Paul are no longer available for a brain scan. But Hughes sees chicanery in the scientific community, which might have a hard time accommodating Saint Paul’s experience within a materialist worldview. “I think it was some epileptologist who wanted to diminish Christianity by making Saint Paul’s experience into a seizure,” Hughes said. “Maybe it’s the only thing scientists can do to try to put it in the context of the twenty-first century. But I’m very willing to see them as what I believe they were—truly deeply religious experiences.”
8 W. Penfield and P. Perot, “The Brain’s Record of Auditory and Visual Experience: A Final Discussion and Summary,” Brain 86 (1963): 595-696.
9 Pierre Gloor and his colleagues found that surgical stimulation or spontaneous discharge in the hippocampus and amygdala—two areas deep in the temporal lobes—evoked memory fragments, dreamy states, and visual or auditory hallucinations. People reported that these events brought intense personal meaning, emotion, vibrations, fear, sudden insight, and mystical-like experiences. P. Gloor et al., “The Role of the Limbic System in Experimental Phenomena of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy,” Annals of Neurology 12 (1982): 129-44.
10 W. Penfield, “The Role of the Temporal Cortex in Certain Psychical Phenomena,” Journal of Mental Science 101 (1955): 458.
11 W. Penfield and T. Rasmussen, The Cerebral Cortex of Man: A Clinical Study of Localization of Function (New York: Macmillan, 1950), p. 174.
12 E. Slater and A. W. Beard, “The Schizophrenia-like Psychoses of Epilepsy: Psychiatric Aspects,” British Journal of Psychiatry 109 (1963): 5-112; also “Discussion and Conclusions,” ibid., 143-50.
13 K. Dewhurst and A. W. Beard, “Sudden Religious Conversions in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy,” British Journal of Psychiatry 117 (1970): 497-507.
14 Not even people in psychiatric hospitals experience many spiritual seizures. Researchers in Japan studied 137 people with temporal lobe epilepsy and found that only three of them (2.2 percent) suffered seizures that were remotely religious in nature. Another study looked at 606 patients and found that only six had religious seizures. Akira Ogata and Taihei Miyakawa, “Religious Experiences in Epileptic Patients with a Focus on Ictus-Related Episodes,” Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences 52 (1998): 321-25.
15 Norwegian researchers Bjørn Asheim Hansen and Eylert Brodtkorb studied eleven patients who experienced ecstatic seizures. Of those, five reported spiritual or religious experiential phenomena. Two felt contact with “an undescribable phenomenon” or a “divine power.” One interpreted her ictal hallucinations to represent “the voice of God.” Three subjects described the sensation of receiving deep messages during the seizures. Two felt that these experiences influenced their day-to-day