Most patients with partial epilepsy, however, don't go into altered states. In a textbook -quoted 14 study, twenty-five percent of 414 such patients exhibited changes in psychic function during an attack. Often these are combined with abnormal movements; co-existing generalized seizures may also be part of the picture. The electroencephalogram is usually awry. The diagnosis of a true seizure disorder is more or less evident.
When psychic symptoms do occur, they may include deja vu, illusions, memory recall, sexual or emotional items, personality changes, body image distortions, or a sense of a presence nearby. These were listed in a recent paper by neurologist R. Mark Sadler and Susan Rahey in the journal Epilep.ruz (2004). They had come upon three patients with medically diagnosed temporal lobe epilepsy who had precognition -a sense of knowing what's about to happen-at the beginning of their seizure. Deja vu was combined with it. (It may be that if you think you've seen it before, you'd also think you would know what was going to happen next, but Sadler believes there's some difference.) The conclusion is that precognition (prescience) "can be a symptom of temporal lobe-originating seizures."
Back in 1981, a Harvard study of twelve patients referred for dissociative-type psychiatric problems found all twelve to have some abnormality in EEG's taken from their temporal lobes. Dissociation comes up frequently in this book; it is among medicine's most bizarre syndromes. Seven of the Harvard patients had multiple personality disorder, and five had possession issues. Only three of the twelve had bona fide convulsive symptoms sufficient to label as epilepsy, but the author feels that all twelve probably qualify for this diagnosis, and that the psychiatric symptoms may result from temporal lobe seizure activity.
Persinger and others have made a connection between paranormal beliefs and partial (temporal lobe) epilepsy. A 1985 paper by Persinger looked at university students and correlated temporal lobe signs-things that could be construed as seizure activity, like deja vu-with students' reports of paranormal experiences. This was a "normal population," not people diagnosed with seizures. He concludes that "mystical or paranormal experiences are associated with transient electrical foci within the temporal lobe of the human brain."
A Canadian team at the University of Windsor, Ontario, publishing in the Brita,h Journal of'Clinical Riychology in 1996, also sampling university students, found the same relationship. A more recent work from the department of psychology at the University of Arizona is entitled "Near-Death Experiences and the Temporal Lobe." They found more epilepsy-like electroencephalographic action in the left temporal lobes of people who had described near-death experiences and concluded that "individuals who have had such experiences are physiologically distinct from the general population."
Standard medical texts have interesting things to say about the temporal lobes. In Principle of Neurology (6th ed., 1997), these regions coordinate sensations, emotions, and behavior, are continuously active, and can be seen as a seat of self-awareness and even of consciousness itself. In Synopea+ of P~ychuztry (9th ed., 2003), schizophrenia is mentioned as a possible consequence of temporal lobe seizure activity; in some studies, seven percent of temporal lobe epilepsy patients have associated schizophrenia.
So Persinger's basic thesis is that people's temporal lobes vary in sensitivity to electricity and magnetism in the environment. Some of us, due to an innate instability in this part of the brain, may be affected by naturally occurring "geophysical" events. Persinger's helmet is made to recreate these; its emanations are designed to mimic signals that could originate in nature.
The Hills and the Homes are Alive
Persinger has also examined the effects of fields emitted from man-made devices. In two separate reports in Perceptual and Motor SkilLi in 2001, paranormal experiences were linked to such exposures. In the first, a female teenager complained of "nightly visitations by a sentient being." These involved vibrations of the bed and a sense of a presence that her body could feel, including sexually. This is reminiscent of Mrs. A. (chapter 7: Intimate Demons); both women felt that they had had intercourse with "a force," although the teenager attributed this to the Holy Spirit, rather than the devil. Persinger found that an electric clock sat eight inches away from the girl's head as she slept. When the clock was removed, the visitations stopped. The girl rapidly became the province of* psychiatrists, and no further follow-up was available.
The second report concerned a small house where a couple suffered waves of' Fear, apparitions, and a sensed presence. These included seeing shadows on the wall, sounds of whispering, and feeling something touching their feet. Persinger measured the house to be "electronically dense," packed with electrical appliances and electronic equipment, and compounded by earth currents and poor grounding. He believes that these, plus an inherent susceptibility of the people involved, created the haunting. In both of these reports, the "sensed presence" is interpreted culturally (religious; ghost).
Persinger believes that the land in some areas is just naturally more alive, electronically speaking. This is particularly true over earthquake faults. People living in these areas, then, may be more likely to experience the bizarre. Some may be genetically prone, due to instability within the temporal lobes.
Persinger also believes that it is not an accident that lightning and thunderstorms, which whip up an area's electromagnetism, are associated in folklore and in literature with the paranormal.
Telepathy, Too
Persinger has another line of interest: information acquisition. While he explains away some paranormal phenomena via interactions of waveforms and temporal lobe hotspots, he has also worked with subjects who had strong telepathic skills. In chapter 3 (the Remote Viewing section), I mentioned his work with a New York artist named Ingo Swann, who could reliably discern photographs within sealed envelopes in another room. He has also studied another man, also middle-aged, named Sean Harribance, who can do the same. Both are discussed in "The Neuropsychiatry of Paranormal Experiences" in The Journal of Neurop.+ychiatry in 2001.
Their abilities were studied as they "received" information from within a room shielded from sound and most electromagnetic activity, known as a Faraday cage. Cell phones and radios won't work, as these are higher frequency waves (half a million cycles per second and up). Very low-frequency waves, ten cycles per second or less, pass through. These are the type generated in nature or by living things. The earth's magnetic field also gets through, although it might be somewhat distorted, so that, for instance, a compass will work.
How was information transmitted to these two subjects? Very low-frequency waves? Embedded into and conducted through the geomagnetic field? In the experiment cited earlier, complex waveforms generated by a Windows operating system "jammed" Mr. Swann's reception, suggesting that some type of wave transmission is involved.
Persinger believes, as do others who research these sorts of things, that telepathy works best when the ambient electromagnetics are relatively quiet. Nighttime, absence of magnetic storms, and the subject's being free of distractions would be examples. On the other hand, visions, ghosts, or "presences" might be enhanced by stronger geomagnetic activity.
A Better Question
Why sensed presences or mystical experiences can be conjured up at all-by seizures, by hypnosis, by psychedelic drugs, by Persinger's machine, or by suggestion-is another question. Even if people are suggestible enough to "see" strange things if they are told to do so, there are still areas of our brains, particularly in the temporal lobes, that, when activated electrically, give us strange senses of time and place. This is clear just from studies on epilepsy.
What are these regions of our central nervous system doing there? Did they evolve? Are they adaptive? Are they remnants of a more primitive time in our history? Persinger sees them as a way of connecting mankind together. His term "sensed presence" describes a generic feeling of not being alone, which can be interpreted culturally as anything from God to space aliens to dragons. If you recall Stanley Milgram's "obedience to authority" experim
ent, it appeared that such obedience was more or less a basic element of human nature. Is it mediated through these same brain regions? Is this what allows humankind to work together under the direction of a leader, spiritual or political, and to pursue common goals that would not be attainable as individuals? If so, that would certainly be adaptive.
I previously mentioned that hallucinations, particularly auditory, can be normal in some contexts. A 1976 book by Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Con.RYU[LPnQai in the Breakdown of the Btc•ameral'find, theorizes that our earlier, more primitive, brains, prior to 1000 B.C., were more like the brains of today's schizophrenics or mystics, seeing visions, hearing voices-i.e., sensing a presence. Jaynes uses archaeological data and writings like the Iliad to bolster his idea. He theorizes that these "hallucinations," attributed to gods, were widespread and considered normal: They directed behavior and bound people socially, and then faded as written language developed, which could do the same. (Jaynes feels that modern-day possession states, hypnotic suggestibility, and schizophrenia are throwbacks to this primeval mind.) Perhaps we've retained a bit of madness that once served a purpose.
Persinger believes that the neuroscience of unexplainable phenomena will ultimately decipher them, and that words like "parapsychology" or "paranormal" will no longer need to exist. He funds his work himself, with an occasional private grant. It is hard to imagine that he has placed 298 entries into the medical literature without being on to something.
twenty
Perspective II: Witches in the Waiting
Room, and Everywhere
In 1993, Dr. David M. Eisenberg of the Harvard Medical School published what would become a landmark study in the New England Journal u/'4 fediciite: "Unconventional Medicine in the United States: Prevalence, Costs, and Patterns of Use." Eisenberg used a telephone survey of over fifteen hundred adults to conclude that unconventional (later "alternative") therapies were a real part of the medical lives of over a third of our patients.
"Unconventional" included acupuncture, chiropractic, massage, prayer, hypnosis, and a variety of other things. That patients were into these things doesn't sound surprising now; but in 1993, alternative medicine was sufficiently alien to the medical profession that most of us didn't know what was going on before our eyes. Eisenberg's paper forced us to notice; a flood of letters to the Neu, Errglam) Journal made it obvious that some doctors had already noticed and didn't think alternative medicine was a bad thing. Even physicians who weren't enthusiastic about the medical benefits of such alternative care realized that they were being left out of the loop: Patients were availing themselves of these therapies and not telling their doctors.
And so alternative medicine was launched. It became okay to mention it to your doctor. It became okay to look at studies of alternative therapies to see what they could and could not do. It even became okay for the National Institutes of Health to make research money available to study these therapies further. Alternative medicine was out of the closet.
As research accumulated, some alternative treatments turned mainstream. Acupuncture was vetted for at least a few conditions. Chiropractic manipulation, in some studies, provided more low-back pain relief at one week than conventional therapy (although there was no difference at one month). Certain herbal remedies contained active substances that really did work. The unconventional, bolstered by data, became conventional.
The alternative overlaps the paranormal, as both are incompletely understood. That is why some of Eisenberg's unconventional therapies comprise chapters in this book. But there is another similarity: Patients who have had paranormal experiences or hold paranormal beliefs, which may be significant enough to impact their health, are unlikely to share this with their doctors. As Eisenberg pointed out, a great deal goes on in front of our medical noses that we don't know about.
My patients have no idea that I have an interest in the paranormal. My general medical practice is rather conventional. I don't do alternative medicine. Whatever reaches me in the way of a bizarre patient experience does so by chance; I don't look for it. Since I've started writing this book, however, co-workers who know of my interest will sometimes share something relevant with me, and I will, rarely, ask a patient about the subject. Let me tell you what has come my way over the years:
• Turning the pages of my local newspaper one morning, I see that a young woman who has been a patient of mine is being sued for divorce and child custody by her husband because ... she is a witch. Literally. According to the paper, the husband would be awakened in the middle of the night by noises, and find his wife robed and chanting and unresponsive to him. If true, this is what a psychiatrist would call dissociation, possibly a multiple personality disorder, or something called a fugue state. My patient. in the article, denied any such goings-on. I did see her in the office about two years later, with her mom, and didn't bring up the news item; neither did she. Of' course, at the time I didn't know I'd be writing this book.
• Recently, another patient came to see me who I knew had been an acquaintance of this first woman. I asked her what she thought. She hadn't seen the other woman in years, but her sense was that this had happened in the context of a bitter divorce, with the husband and his mother vying for custody of the child. In messy divorces these days, anything goes; why not accusations of witchcraft? My present patient did say that my former patient had been a serious witchcraft hobbyist, but that she thought the reported accusations were greatly exaggerated.
Then she added that she, too, was a fairly serious witchcraft hobbyist.
• I found out, in a casual conversation with a colleague, that a female resident whom I had trained considered herself a witch. And her mother was a witch too. I can say that none of these three women had anything about them that struck me as peculiar, other-worldly, or in any way out of the ordinary. In fact, these three seemed pretty well-adjusted.
• At a clinic where I teach, the same clinic where years earlier the banker who "died on time" had been a patient, a nurse told me that many of our patients there were witches, some professional. Naively, I asked what the difference was between a serious witchcraft hobbyist and a professional witch. It turns out that our clinic's professional witches get paid for their services. Yikes.
The nurse explaining this to me had a master's degree in applied anthropology, from which her interest derived. As I asked some questions about witchcraft, I ascertained that our practitioners were multi-ethnic, and practicing different types of the craft. (The term "witchcraft" encompasses many sects and variations; for simplicity, I'm using the word in its general sense.) Then another clinic nurse I'll call Angela happened by, and the anthropologist nurse said "Why don't you just ask Angela? She's a witch."
Who knew? So Angela and I went into my office, where she was happy to talk to me. Her calling began as a teenager, when she realized that she had telepathic abilities. It ran in her family: Her maternal grandmother was a witch, her mother was not. All I had known was that Angela was an ordinary (i.e., regular) nurse.
In other words, I go to work as a physician every day, and I'm surrounded by witches. I just never knew it. I suspect that my colleagues' patients are no different. Not to mention some of my colleagues and co-workers.
• Other things cross my medical path. A well-dressed, seventyish woman who is always a little anxious and depressed volunteers the information that her divorced daughter has taken up with a new boyfriend, whom she met on the Internet. The medical student also in the room knows of my interests; the patient does not. Perhaps she feels that we look sympathetic and willing to listen. According to my patient, this boyfriend "has powers." He hypnotizes her two-year-old grandchild to where the little boy tells his grandma "Don't look at me!" He defrosts bacon by putting the package in water and staring at it intently. "It pops right up to the top, defrosted," she says, looking right at me as if to say "see what I have to put up with!"
• I ask a seventy-year-old woman, whose husband is in the
hospital, for a phone number where I can reach her. She takes out a business card and writes the number on the back. The front of her card says "Psychic Reader."
• A schizophrenic patient I oversee with a resident in training at the university's family practice center tells the resident physician that she believes her illness is the result of witchcraft.
• Years ago, I made an unannounced house call to a Hispanic clinic patient who had signed herself out of the hospital two months earlier. She had been admitted for a lung problem, and sputum had been collected during her stay for culture in the hospital laboratory. Now, her sputum was growing a germ that looked like tuberculosis. (It can take about six weeks to grow tuberculosis in cultures.) The woman was in her fifties, with a cough, a horrible-looking chest Xray, and twenty or thirty pounds of lost weight. When simpler tests had failed to make a diagnosis, a lung biopsy was the next step. She wouldn't take it.
Since tuberculosis is a public health problem, I decided to go to her home with bottles of pills for her to take, if'she would, and materials to test the rest of her family. Even if she didn't want treatment herself', surely she would allow testing of the others in the house, which included children. After some deliberation as I stood at the door, the family let me in.
I didn't know if the woman would be dead or alive. She had looked pretty sick two months before. But now she looked great! All the weight had returned, and she claimed to feel just fine. She laughed at the idea of swallowing the pills I'd brought. Then the family had a conference and decided to let me in on what had happened. After leaving the hospital, she had gone to a "witch doctor," who gave her some leaves in a jar, which cured her. Only she didn't even ingest these leaves; she simply placed the jar under her bed.
The Witch in the Waiting Room: A Physician Investigates Paranormal Phenomena in Medicine Page 20