• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Jordan was raised in a Conservative Jewish home. His parents were both Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe. Still, he never embraced religion.

“I always thought organized religion was a con game,” he told me the first time we talked, in November 2006.“It always got me mad that on High Holy Days you had to buy tickets to pray.”

Jordan constructed a life as a highly successful comedy writer in Los Angeles. In 2000, when he was forty-three, his doctor found and removed a benign tumor from his left temporal lobe. The surgery was a snap. But later Jordan began experiencing strange things. Sometimes when he was shaving, he said, his hands seemed unfamiliar, as if someone else’s fingers were wielding the razor. One day while he was shopping at the nearby mall, the stores suddenly appeared unreal.

“The storefronts all looked like façades, like sets on a movie location. The lighting was wrong. The people—they looked real, but they kind of looked a little bit animated, a little bit of a Pixar quality to them. And I was so afraid for a moment there—it just looked like at any moment someone was going to come out and yell,‘Cut, we got it!’ and tear away the entire mall, and there were going to be a million people working there, you know, cleaning up, and all the people were extras. That’s how fake it seemed.”

What Jordan did not know was that jamais vu—in which the familiar seems brand-new: the opposite of déjà vu—commonly plagues people with temporal lobe epilepsy. Shortly after the shopping-mall episode, Jordan visited his neurologist. His MRI films revealed that, as a result of his surgery, his left temporal lobe had retreated from his skull. It was a different shape and size, and new scarring was causing electrical storms in his head. Jordan had developed temporal lobe epilepsy. But the organic change in his brain was nothing compared with the one in his heart.

Jordan could pinpoint the moment of his spiritual epiphany. He and his eleven-year-old daughter were reading about world religions. They worked through the chapters on Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism without event.

“When we got to the chapter on Buddhism, as soon as I started to read it, the light went on in my head, and it was almost as if I had found the definition that fit the things I was feeling and thinking.”

He laughed, a little embarrassed. “I probably know less about Buddhism than you do. But it seems to me, Buddhism is the truth. I feel it. I mean, right now I’m looking at my fireplace mantel, where I have ...” He inhaled deeply. “Let’s see—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven statues of Buddha looking at me. I’m wearing a mala bracelet, which is like a rosary. I’ve been wearing one every day—don’t know what it means, don’t know its significance, but I feel that if I’m not wearing it, I forget ...”

His voice trailed off.

“I do know I’ve never believed more in spirituality, never believed more that it has answers to the most basic questions.”

Neurologists might classify Jordan as having Geschwind syndrome, in which his small seizures rewrote his mental script, his values, and his thoughts, not only during the seizures, but all the moments in between. I told Jordan that scientists would probably relegate his spiritual conversion—the top-to-bottom overhaul in his values, his new Buddhist view that compassion trumps success—to a brain disorder.

“I know,” he sighed. “It’s kind of sad in a way to think that your religious beliefs, or your feelings of spirituality, or your peace and love for your fellow man, is a mistake that comes from an electrical impulse that’s gone awry. But I’ll tell you what the real bottom line is for me: I don’t care where it comes from. I’m much happier feeling the way that I do now about spirituality and religion and tolerance and compassion. I’m a more decent human being every day because of it.”

The Cosmic Electrician

Jordan Sinclair’s story piqued my curiosity about how, precisely, a brain generates