FT270


There’s a sudden drop in temper­ature. The room feels icy cold. You feel an unearthly, malign presence. You can just see it out of the corner of your eye – at least you think you can. Congratulations! You’ve just seen your first ghost. Or have you just had your first temporal lobe seizure?

A number of sceptics, scientists and parapsychologists think that many strange experiences can be explained as the result of disturbances in the brain’s temporal lobe. Thanks to our increased understanding of the workings of the human brain, we may now have a handy physiological explanation for a wide range of anomalous experiences: disturbances in witnesses’ temporal lobes (such as an epileptic seizure) could be responsible for their experiencing a whole range of uncanny symptoms.

The left and right temporal lobes’ day-to-day work involves such functions as memory, language and emotions. They are also important in processing information from our senses, including smell, taste and vision. People with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) often describe strange sensations and experiences. For example, they may see strange lights or have a strange taste in the mouth. They may notice an odd smell, or experience a change in temperature which leaves them feeling exceptionally hot or shivery. There can be intense feelings of déjà vu or jamais vu, anxiety and panic or elation and euphoria. Sometimes, they perform automatisms such as scratching or lip-smacking. There can even be vivid hallucinations. If the seizure activity spreads across the brain, the patient may go on to have a tonic-clonic seizure (formerly known as grand-mal) and lose consciousness entirely, perhaps shaking or jerking violently.

Looking at the symptoms of TLE and studying witness accounts of supposedly paranormal phenomena, it’s easy to see parallels between the symptoms of temporal lobe seizures and experiences of various anomalies. A whole range of strange experiences might be explained as temporal lobe seizures (see FT71:32; 76:51). Ghost sightings are easiest, with the sudden chill, sense of foreboding and looming presence. Alien abductions and other bedtime visitors are also tidily disposed of. In fact, once you put your mind to it, it’s hard to find a paranormal experience that can’t be explained, at least in part, by a disturbance of the temporal lobe.

For example, any time someone sees something strange (in the absence of concrete permanent physical evid­ence), it could be a hallucination. So that’s cryptids and other weird creature sightings explained. Bigfoot witnesses often note a particularly foul smell at the time of their encounter, presumably coming from the mystery hominid; and if the lumbering man-beast should make a sound, then that could still be part of a hallucination. Olfactory, visual and auditory hallucinations are all known symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy.

People with TLE also report missing time – which means that the time slips and fugues associated with, say, alien abductions can now be put in the ‘solved’ pile too. Oh, and as you don’t remember where you were during your episode of missing time, then you probably moved those objects or did that funny writing too: apports or polter­geist activity are no longer instances of either supernatural or fraudulent activity – the witness just doesn’t remember doing this stuff.

With déjà vu common in TLE, if you feel you’ve been here before or that you saw tonight’s news report last week, it’s almost certainly just a small temporal lobe event and not evidence of either precognition or reincarnation.

The tendency towards dissociative states and de-personalisation (in which a subject has the sensation of watching themselves act) during a seizure means we can also chalk up Out-Of-Body experiences and even some Near-Death Experiences to our new favourite explanation for the extraordinary.

The adaptability of the temporal lobe explanation to almost any strange experience is obviously its most appealing feature, but there are other reasons why this explanation is gaining ground. For one thing, it is extremely sympath­etic to the witness, who no longer needs to be labelled as mad, delusional or lying. He or she is just experiencing a strange by-product of the way our brains work.

We’ve long known that the brain affects our perceptions of the world, and this is just another example of how our minds can play tricks on us. A temporal lobe seizure giving rise to an experience of the paranormal is unsettling and fascinating. But it’s no more bizarre than an optical illusion or a strange and vivid dream. It doesn’t require any rewriting of physics or any change in our understanding of the way the Universe works and our place in it.

One of the most important principles of science is that effects should be reproducible. The theory that experiences of anomalous phenomena come from a disturbance in the temporal lobe has been borne out many times in laboratory conditions. For example, in 2000 Michael Persinger and his team were able to induce a “haunting” in a subject using magnetic fields. Persinger has been able to reproduce such experiences a number of times and capture the results on an electro­encephalo­gram (EEG). This has culminated in the creation of the so-called “God Helmet” which can induce spiritual experiences by stimul­ating the wearer’s temporal lobe (see FT42:50–54; 201:39; 205:4–5).

The temporal lobe theory also, to a surprisingly large degree, has the potential to explain some of the “phys­ical” manifestations of paranormal experience that might otherwise give researchers pause for thought. It’s known that during complex partial seizures patients can scratch at themselves and cause injuries. If the seizure progresses to a full tonic-clonic with violent movements they might even appear to jerk off the bed, seemingly “levitating”. In fact, a diagnosis of epilepsy has to be ruled out (along with various other neurological and psychiatric disorders) before the Catholic Church can perform an exorcism. Anneliese Michel, who died during an exorcism in 1976, had been diagnosed with severe temporal lobe epilepsy. Tragically, she refused treatment for the condition and had become convinced she was demonically possessed.

But it’s important to realise (and this is another reason the temporal lobe explanation is so clever) that the witness doesn’t have to have epilepsy for a brief temporal lobe glitch to produce seizure symptoms. It’s widely believed that one in 20 people will have a seizure at some point in their lifetime. Just because you’ve once seen a ghost, that doesn’t mean you now have epilepsy. But if, like many witnesses, you have a history of recurrent strange experiences then you might have epilepsy, which is defined as having recurrent unprovoked seizures.

Current thinking about epilepsy proposes that everybody has a “seizure threshold”. For most people, the 19 out of 20, this threshold is so high that they will never experience a seizure at all. But a whole variety of things can lower an individual’s seizure threshold: things like fever, fatigue, head injury, stress or hunger. External factors such as magnetic fields can also trigger temporal lobe anomalies. These don’t just have to be administered in a laboratory but could occur naturally. Again, the hypothesis fits the evidence: strange phenomena often seem to cluster in specific places. If an area has a particular problem with magnetic fields, it could repeatedly lower the seizure thresholds of individuals, creating a history as a “haunted” or “weird” location.

Researchers can flesh the hypo­thesis out a bit more by merging it with other explanations for extra- ordinary happenings. By adding these, it’s possible to expand the net a bit wider and explain even more strange events – even those with multiple witnesses.

Several years ago, ergot poisoning and the influence of other moulds (including hallucinogenic mushrooms whether ingested on purpose or by accident) was a popular retrospective explanation for a number of different episodes of strangeness, including the Salem Witch Trials and France’s werewolf panics. Conveniently, such poisonings are known to cause seizures.

In some cases, it would be ridicul­ous to suggest that every person in a group that experiences something uncanny must have been having a seizure. In these cases, we do have to resort to a bit of abnormal psycho­logy by playing the “mass hysteria” card. But we might still suggest that the primary or index case was experi­encing a temporal lobe event. The others were then influenced to share the delusion.

But should we be worried that it’s all a little too tidy? That the theory is so elegant and comprehensive that any investigations of other theories come to seem rather pointless? And isn’t it a bit boring and reductionist that centuries’ worth of forteana all boils down to a weakness of the human temporal lobe?

And is it even an accurate explan­ation? Most people with the condition don’t go around having extraordinary and otherwise inexplicable experiences. A seizure might feel strange and bizarre, but most of the time it’s simply a tedious medical interruption of normal life.

Suggesting that all these witnesses (particularly those experiencing a number of incidents) are having seizures has serious implications. A situation could arise where someone was suspected of having epilepsy when they don’t. While awaiting diagnosis, a patient is unable to drive or operate machinery in case they have a seizure and harm themselves or others. They might very well lose their income. Epilepsy is a life-changing diagnosis, and the stress of waiting for confirm­ation for a diagnosis is enormous. If the weight of clinical evidence (for example, they had seen strange lights on a number of occasions) is sufficient, then a patient wouldn’t even need to have had an abnormal EEG to be diagnosed. Following diagnosis, the patient might be put on anti-epileptic drugs, which can cause serious side effects.

What if TLE just mimics paranormal experiences? Does the existence of paranormal-like TLE symptoms exclude the possibility of strange experiences caused by other things? It is possible that while certain parts of the brain produce paranormal effects there remains outside of the brain para­normal activity that is not produced inside the brain. It’s also possible that when researchers identify parts of the brain that can produce paranormal experiences that what they have really found is the part of the brain, the mechanism, where humans experience and process the uncanny phenomena of the Universe at large.

But the temporal lobe hypothesis is far too useful to be abandoned anytime soon, and remains one of the most compelling attempts at an ultimate fortean explanation for everything. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that it will ever explain frog falls.