Let me preface this by saying that this is all wild speculation posited for fun and silliness and should not be considered serious.
I just read this interesting article on the Discover Magazine website (I don’t remember seeing it in the print version of the magazine) about the brain chemistry of near death experiences and out-of-body experiences.
What caught my eye was this quote:
[Wilder] Penfield, one of the giants of modern neuroscience, discovered that stimulating the brain’s right temporal lobe–located just above the ear–with a mild electric current produced out-of-body experiences, heavenly music, vivid hallucinations, and the kind of panoramic memories associated with the life review part of the near-death experience. This helped explain why right temporal lobe epilepsy was a condition long defined by its most prominent symptom: excessive religiosity characterized by an intense feeling of spirituality, mystical visions, and auditory hallucinations of the voice-of-God variety.
Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Follow me across the fold to see…
As I read this passage, I flashed back to the first Presidential debate between Bush and Kerry last year. Remember, there was all sorts of speculation that W. may have some sort of medical condition? He was lethargic, incoherent, had a glassy look in his eyes, and one corner of his mouth was drooping and collecting spittle. Most people speculated that he was on some sort of sedative, but I remember reading more than one opinion that he was taking an anti-epileptic medication.
I also remember seeing people speculate that epilepsy may explain Bush’s bicycle falls and pretzel choking.
This also caught my eye:
[Willoughby Britton, a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Arizona] hypothesized that people who have undergone a near-death experience might show the same altered brain firing patterns as people with temporal lobe epilepsy… Britton recruited 23 people who had a near-death experience and 23 who had undergone neither a near-death experience nor a life-threatening traumatic event. Then, working at a sleep lab, she hooked up her subjects to electrodes that measured EEG activity all over the brain–including the temporal lobes–and recorded everything that happened while they slept.
She then asked a University of Arizona epilepsy specialist who knew nothing about the experiment to analyze the EEGs…Twenty-two percent of the group with near-death experience showed synchrony in the temporal lobe, the same kind of firing pattern associated with temporal lobe epilepsy. “Twenty-two percent may not sound like a lot of anything,” says Britton, “but it’s actually incredibly abnormal, so much so that it’s beyond the realm of chance.”
She also found something that didn’t fit with her hypothesis. The temporal lobe synchrony wasn’t happening on the right side of the brain, the site that had been linked in Penfield’s studies to religious feeling in temporal lobe epilepsy. Instead she found it on the left side of the brain. That finding made some people uncomfortable because it echoed studies that pinpointed, in far more detail than Penfield achieved, the exact locations in the brain that were most active and most inactive during periods of profound religious experience.
Was Bush’s pretzel incident a near death experience? Nah, his religiosity certainly goes further back than that event. I wonder, did he suffer some other near-death experience around the same time he found Jesus? Nothing that I could find online. Could his previous drug/alcohol use/abuse have caused a similar alteration to his brain wave patterns? That would be a question for the experts, and I am certainly not one.
So that’s my tin-foil hat supposition, that Bush has some brain injury/alteration/defect similar to temporal lobe epilepsy that explains his talking with God.
CP at DKos, where it may get me banned.
