Blog May 30 2016
Here’s something interesting: “God Has Sent Me To You” by Arzy and Schurr, in Epilepsy & Behavior (not to mention the usual pop-sci sites that ran with it a couple weeks back1). Middle-aged Jewish male, practicing but not religious, goes off his meds as part of an ongoing treatment for grand mal seizures (although evidently “tonic-clonic” seizures is now the approved term). Freed from the drugs, he is touched by God. He sees Yahweh approaching, converses with It, accepts a new destiny: he is now The Chosen One, assigned by the Almighty to bring Redemption to the People of Israel. He rips the leads off his scalp and stalks out into the hospital corridors in search of disciples.
That’s right: they got it all on tape. Seven seconds of low-gamma spikes in the 30-40Hz range (I didn’t know what that was either—turns out it’s a pattern of neural activity, gamma waves, associated with “conscious attention”).
(The figures—which show the usual sexy false-color hot-spots on an MRI—might lead you astray if you don’t read the fine print. They didn’t actually get God’s footprints on an MRI. They got them on one of those lo-tech EEGs that traces squiggly lines across a display, then they photoshopped the relevant spikes onto an archival MRI image for display purposes.)
Regardless, the findings themselves are really interesting. For one thing, the God spikes manifested on the left prefrontal cortex, although the seizure was concentrated in the right temporal. For another, God took Its own sweet time taking the stage: the conversion event happened eight hours after the seizure. They’re still trying to figure out what to make of all this.
The behavioral manifestations are classic, though. This guy didn’t just believe he was the chosen one; he knew it down in the gut, with the same certainty that you know your arm is attached to your shoulder. When asked what he was going to do with his disciples when he recruited them, he admitted that he had no plan, that he didn’t need one: God would tell him what to do.
God didn’t, of course. They managed to shut the psychosis down with olanzapine, returned the patient to normalcy a few hours after the event. As far as I know he’s back at work, his buddies on the factory floor blissfully unrecruited.
But what if he hadn’t got better?
This is hardly the first time temporal-lobe epilepsy has been implicated in religious fanaticism; medical correlates extend back to the seventies, and tonic-clonic seizures have been trotted out to retrospectively explain martyrs and prophets going all the way back to the Old Testament. Perhaps the most famous such case involved Saul of Tarsus.
You know that guy. First-century dude, dual citizen (Saul was his Jewish name, Paul his Roman one—let’s just call him SPaul). Didn’t much like these newfangled Christian cults that were springing up everywhere following the crucifixion. His main claim to fame was being the coat-check guy at the stoning of Stephen, up until he was struck blind by a bright light en route to Damascus.
God spoke to SPaul, too. Converted him from nemesis to champion on the spot. There was no olanzapine available. It’s been two thousand years and we’re still picking up the pieces.
Epilepsy isn’t the only explanation that’s been put forth for SPaul’s conversion. Some have argued for a near-miss by a meteorite, on the grounds that the blinding light couldn’t have been hallucinatory since Saul’s traveling companions also saw it. That’s true, according to some accounts; other versions have those same companions hearing God’s voice but not seeing the light. If I had to choose (and if I was denied the option of dismissing the whole damn tale as retconned religious propaganda), I’d believe the latter iteration, and chalk those sounds up to a bout of ululation during the seizure. Speaking in tongues, blindness—most dramatically, of course, the whole hyper-religiosity thing—are all consistent with temporal-lobe epilepsy.
Unlike his (vastly less-influential) 21st Century counterpart, SPaul was not charged with Redeeming the Israelites: Jesus already had dibs on those guys. Instead, Paul claimed that Yahweh had assigned him to preach to the Gentiles, a much vaster market albeit not the one for whom Christ’s teachings were originally intended. Biblical scholar Hugh Schonfield speculates that the reason SPaul had such a hate-on for Jesus in the first place might have been because SPaul regarded himself as the Messiah. (Apparently every second person you met back then regarded themselves as The Chosen One, thanks to Scriptures which promised that such a savior was due Any Day Now, and to ancillary prophecies vague enough to apply to anyone from Rocket Raccoon to Donald Trump). This would imply that SPaul’s roadside conversion was not an isolated event, and sure enough there’s evidence of recurring hallucinations, paranoia, and delusions of grandeur at other times in his life (although these may be more consistent with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder than with epilepsy2). According to Schonfield, SPaul—denied the job of Jewish Messiah—took on the Christ’s-Ambassador-to-the-Gentiles gig as a kind of consolation prize.
The irony, of course, is that modern Christianity is arguably far more reflective of SPaul’s teachings than of Jesus’s. Cue two thousand years of crusade, inquisition, homophobia, and misogyny.
So let us all bow our heads in a moment of silent gratitude both for the miracle of modern pharmaceuticals, and for the diligent neurologists at Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Center. Thanks to them, we may have dodged a bullet.
This time, at least.