epilepsy

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.

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.

In an electroencephalogram_ one of her seizures was almost identical to an orgasm... Nothing happened during a seizure that couldn__ happen outside one, except that Roselyn was not in control of it and it happened all at once. Since then, she had experienced hundreds of orgasms and dozens of seizures and, though she didn__ come close to finding the latter nearly as entertaining as the former, it was always in her mind. In the midst of Dryden__ often machine gun lovemaking or her own considerably more directed and soft ministrations, it was always in the back of her mind at the moment of climax__his is a tenth of a seizure, this is a fifth of one.

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

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

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.

But they turned out to be prescriptions for medicines, and not for the common cold: opium, lavender oil, belladonna, orange rind, chloral hydrate, strychnine, potassium bromide. Such sedatives and stimulants were common remedies at that time for epilepsy.

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

It__ easier for me to make sense of it that way than it is for me to face the other way__eality. And yet, those evil spirits that were unleashed__e they fake entities from a stupid carnival ride, or cruel malevolencies from dark spiritual chasms of our universe__ave stayed with me all these years

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.

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.

[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.