Saturday, 1 October 2022

How to Get Scarlett Johansson's Phone Number




I'm in love with Scarlett Johansson. Not just the fling of "Lost in Translation" or the attraction of "Under the Skin", but the passionate and complex love of "Vicky Christina Barcelona". My wife tells me that I would have nothing in common with this Hollywood diva, but I'm sure she would give up her fame and fortune for the quiet life with a bald and middle-aged neurologist.

I might just bump into her at an art gallery. Like Jonathan Rhys Meyers did in Woody Allen's 2005 movie "Match Point". In the movie, Nola Rice (Johansson) and Chris Wilton (Meyers) were lovers, but she moved away, and now at this chance meeting he urges her to reconnect.
JRM: Say your phone number.
SJ: What’s the point?
JRM: Just say your phone number.
SJ: Chris…
JRM: Please. Say your phone number.
SJ: O two o seven nine four six o nine nine six.
JRM: I’ll call you.

Johannson delivers the eleven digit phone number fast, fluently and straight-faced. And it seems unlikely that Meyers would remember it, but he does. Maybe because he has a capability for digits. Or maybe because he is highly motivated - as I would be, if I was given Scarlett Johannsons phone number at a chance meeting at an art gallery. Well, most likely he remembers the number for the sake of the narrative in the movie.
The ability to remember independent digits or words is widely used as a measure of short-term memory. The capacity for storing numbers is known as digit-span, and the average digit-span in adults is seven, normally ranging from five to nine.
Short-term memory - or working memory - is temporary. It is fine for limited information you need to use within a minute or so; for instance typing a phone number you’ve just heard, or flipping to the book page you just found in the index. You use this information briefly, and then it disappears. 
But Meyers will have to remember the phone number for hours before he can call Johannson. He will have to process the digits, rehearse them and store them in his long-term memory. And later, when he wants to call Johannson, he will have to recall the digits.



Memory is a process of input, rehearsal, storage and recall. This ‘multi-store’ model (The Atkinson-Shiffrin Model) may be simplistic, but it is easily understood, and it will explain most of the mnemonic functions of our daily lives.

A few examples:
I’m not much of a cook, so I usually need a recipe. It will tell me the amount of the specific ingredients, and I will need this input only while adding the ingredients. For my pie crust, the recipe states that I should use three cups of flour, one cup of butter and one egg. I will keep this information in my working memory for a minute or so, but once all the ingredients are in the bowl, and the mixing begins, I will forget all about it. But the kids really love my pies, so I might use that recipe again. Every time I use it, I rehearse the information, and eventually it will be stored in my long-term memory. Now I can recall the ingredients and the amounts for the pie without the input of the printed recipe.
This process of rehearsal, storage and recall works for most of what we need to remember. If highly motivated however, you will not need much rehearsal; for instance, I highly recommend storing the information of your girlfriend’s birthday, the first time she tells you. I did, and it worked out well. On the other hand, remembering our wedding anniversary proved difficult and required a few years of rehearsal (and displeasure on my wife's account), before it was stored in my long-term memory.
When unmotivated, immediate storage is difficult. One of my less helpful abilities is to completely forget the name of someone that I’ve just been introduced to; I might hear his name and keep that input in my working memory for a brief period, but it never makes it more than a few seconds, and it never reaches long-term memory. It’s a struggle, but luckily my wife helps me out and remembers the name of every parent of every child in our son’s school.
The transfer from working memory to long-term memory is critical. When damaged, the ability to learn new information is impaired. This is a common feature in Alzheimer disease and other dementias. Working at a memory clinic, I ask about my patients ability to remember, and I will often learn that “she remembers the past just fine, but she cannot remember what happened yesterday.” In terms of the multi-store model, she can recall events already stored in the long-term memory, but she cannot rehearse or store new information in the long-term memory. This is one of the first signs of dementia; the inability to store (or learn) new information. As disease progresses, recall of earlier events will also be defective.
More pronounced is the loss of storage in Korsakoff psychosis. Described by Russian neuropsychiatrist Sergei Korsakoff in 1887, this is a syndrome associated with the deficiency of the vitamin B1 (thiamine) seen in alcoholism and other disorders of malnutrition. Patients will appear alert and talkative reporting no difficulties, but will have complete anterograde amnesia. In terms of the multi-store model, they will have a preserved working memory of a minute or so, but they completely lack the ability to store input in long-term memory. Immediate recall performed in the working memory is intact, but delayed recall is defective.
I will ask the patient to repeat a seven-item address, and he will do this with no difficulties. I will rehearse the address with him a few times, then ask him to remember it for later recall, and he will agree. But after a few minutes of other tasks, he will have completely forgotten the address and even the instruction that there was an address to remember. Sometimes I will talk to the patient for an hour, then walk out the door and wait in the hallway for a minute or two, then walk back in and ask him if we have met before. He will have no recollection of me as the doctor he just talked to, or even the fact that he had recently talked to a doctor. Sometimes he will present some kind of explanation like “I think we played football together,” illustrating the confabulations that fill out the gaps of his memory. Some patients will give detailed personal information that is correct - but corresponding to an earlier phase of their life. One patient who had been institutionalized for months, told me in details about her job and her apartment from twenty years ago like it was yesterday, lacking all insight that she had lost both job and apartment due to alcoholism. When asked how long she had been living in the nursing home, she replied that she had stayed there for a few days and was planning to go home soon.
In the Korsakoff psychosis, most other cognitive functions will be intact. The patient may perform difficult calculations flawlessly or copy detailed drawings - then minutes later, when noticing the piece of paper, he may ask who did those drawings.

On the other end of the spectrum, memory can be trained to impressive performances. We seem to think of memory in terms of storage of limited capacity, but the opposite might be true. The more knowledge already stored, the easier it is to find something to relate new information to.
One ancient technique is the “method of loci” or “memory journey,” in which items to be remembered are visualized in a familiar environment. In a famous case study by Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, the impressive mnemonist Solomon Shereshevsky was presented with long lists of unrelated numbers or words. He would learn these by visualizing them at a familiar road, for instance along his walk to work. One word leaned against a fence, another word underneath a lamp post. Later, when Luria asked him to recall the list of words, he would simply imagine his walk to work, recalling each word along the way. Sometimes he would forget a word if it was placed in the darkness of a doorway or otherwise out of sight. But most words were remembered, sometimes for years.

My own mnemonic functions of storage and recall are average. I walk around art galleries looking for Scarlett Johansson, hoping to pick up her phone number. My wife likes the knickknacks of the museum shops, so I have a lot of time scouting for the actress on my own. I’m sure she will fall for my intellectual charms and my baldness. But my working memory is not as finely tuned as that of Shereshevsky or even Jonathan Rhys Meyers, so I might not be successful in remembering her phone number. I’ll bring a pen.

________________

Allen W (Director) & Aronson L, Darwin L, Wiley G (Producers): Match Point [Motion picture]. BBC Films. 2005
Gade A: Hjerneprocesser: Kognition og neurovidenskab. Frydenlund Grafisk. 1997
Luria AR: The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory. Harvard University Press. 1987


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Sunday, 25 September 2022

A Medical Student Walks Into a Brothel


It is one of the most disturbing paintings I have ever seen. Five naked women staring at me; disproportionate, disfigured, dark faced, primitive. They are terrifying. As they should be. They are prostitutes.


The scene is a brothel in Calle de Aviñón in Barcelona, and the artist used to visit this brothel as a student. Pablo Picasso’s 1907 “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon” is as disturbing today as it was among contemporary artists more than a century ago. It inspired early cubism, ushering in a revolution in the art of the twentieth century. By applying classical features of nudity, drapery and fruits, Picasso anchored the painting in tradition, yet shattered the safety with these hostile figures.

Prostitutes should provide a sexual fantasy. But the women in Picasso’s brothel are apathetic and unapproachable. And although it would be another few years before Sigmund Freud would coin the term ‘castration anxiety,’ these demoiselles express exactly that ancient fear of emasculation or impotens. It would be a recurring theme in the first decades of the twentieth century.


Picasso initially meant the painting to be an allegory of venereal disease, sinfulness and mortality. In early studies for the painting, the whores are accompanied by a sailor and a medical student. The student holds a skull; an obvious reminder of sickness and death. Going to a whorehouse is a discouraging experience, involving the obvious risk of disease.


Early study for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.
On the left, a student enters with a human skull.


In the beginning of the twentieth century, the venereal disease of syphilis had been on the rise for decades. Although records of prevalence are inadequate, syphilis had probably been one of the largest public health burdens in Europe since the initial identification in 1494. During the scourge of the 1500s, it had spread through a war torn Europe by the movements of troops. Causing skin ulcerations, sores and later madness and heart disease, syphilis was described as one of the worst afflictions to man. A treatment with mercury compounds was often more devastating than the disease itself, and the term “a night with Venus, a life with Mercury” would scare most people from extramarital activities.

But during the nineteenth century, syphilis gathered fame among the French avantgarde, credited as causing ingenuity, creative brilliance and tirelessness. Writers Baudelaire and Maupassant suffered from syphilis, the latter even boasting about it. Painter Vincent van Gogh admitted the disease in his correspondence with his younger brother Theo van Gogh - the latter dying from neurosyphilis at the age of 33 just six months after Vincents suicide. A new surge of syphilis swept through Europe.

At the same time, neurology was on the rise as a scientific discipline. The late stages of syphilis was an obvious object of interest, because the disease infects the central nervous system. In fact, two very important clinical tests, still used by clinicians today, were originally developed to diagnose neurosyphilis; the Romberg test and the pupillary light reflex. 

Credited as 'the first clinical neurologist', Moritz Heinrich Romberg (1795 - 1873) developed a maneuver to examine position sense (proprioception). In late stage syphilis, the disease will enter the central nervous system and cause degeneration of the spinal cord (known as tabes dorsalis). This will cause loss of position sense in the legs and feet. In Romberg's maneuver, the patient is asked to stand with feet together and eyes closed. In order to maintain balance without the aid of vision, the patient relies on proprioception; he needs to sense where his feet and legs are, and this sensation is led to the brain via the posterior columns of the spinal cord. A degeneration of the spinal cord, as present in neurosyphilis, will cause the patient to lose his balance and fall. The Romberg test is still in use today as an examination of neurodegeneration, for instance in multiple sclerosis. 

Ophthamologist Douglas Argyll Robertson (1837 - 1909) introduced the pupillary light reflex as an examination of the nervous system. In a healthy person, pupils contract when exposed to bright light. They also contract (accommodate) when focused on a near object, for instance while reading. In patients affected with neurosyphilis, Argyll Robertson observed pupils contracting normally on a near object, but not contracting when exposed to bright light. Now known as Argyll Robertson pupils,this finding is a highly specific diagnostic for neurosyphilis. Today, the pupillary light reflex is a basic screening test in every physical examination.


At the turn of the century, syphilis was widespread. The late stages of neurosyphilis causing depression, psychosis, dementia and death were well known.
Consequently, to a medical student visiting a brothel in Barcelona in 1907, venereal disease was a very palpable risk. “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon” merges sexual desire with the fear of death in an unmistakable horror.

Incidentally, that same year arsephemanine was synthesized for the first time in Paul Ehrlich’s laboratory in Germany. Two years later, its effectiveness as an antisyphilitic compound was discovered in the same lab. In 1910, the drug was marketed as Salvarsan, and until the introduction of penicillin in the 1940es, Salvarsan and Neosalvarsan were the drugs of choice in the management of syphilis. These advances were based on another German discovery; the identification of Treponema Pallidum as the bacterium causing syphilis. In effect, arsephemanine was the first modern antimicrobial drug in the history of infectious diseases.


None of this really mattered to Picasso. The brothel in Calle de Aviñón was in every sense far away from German laboratories and scientists. The prostitutes were terrifying. The fear of disease and death was very real.


In the final painting, the sailor and the student are left out. This may be the true genius of the painting. By leaving out the clients, whoever looks at the painting, becomes the client. I am the voyeur, and the whores look at me judgingly. I disgust them. As I should; I am the client in a whorehouse. And now, you are too.


________________


Hughes R: The Shock of the New. Art and the Century of Change. Thames & Hudson. 1991

Porter R: The Greatest Benefit To Mankind - A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present. HarperCollinsPublishers. 1997

Freud S: The Interpretation of Dreams. 4th Edition. Imago Publishing. 1942

Freud S: Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. 1927

_________________


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Sunday, 31 January 2021

Sex - You Don't Get It

 


This blog post is about penises.
I am sorry for the inelegant introduction, but penises is what this blog post is about. I have been contemplating this introduction for weeks, and penises are inherently fun, so this should easily have been witty. But penises are also awkward and ridiculous, they can be arrogant or offensive, they may be associated with shame or inferiority, they can be the object of envy or anxiety. So finally, I found no elegant way to sidestep into this subject.
This blog post is about penises. Specifically about pictures of penises. And about sexuality and the interaction of the sexes.

And if my introduction was a disappointment, please find it compensated by the best written introduction to any scientific paper ever. I am hands down in awe of Flora Oswald’s minimalistic and concise abstract on… well, on dick pics:


Given that the sharing of genital images – colloquially known as “dick pics”– has become a widespread phenomenon, the purpose of the present study was to explore men’s motivations for sending unsolicited images of their genitalia.
[Oswald et al. 2019]


If that does not leave you gasping for more, then I am very sorry, I cannot help you.
But if research on the interaction of the sexes in the post #MeToo era is just your thing, this paper should be on your curriculum. It is thorough and extremely well written, and it balances gender and genitals delicately. For instance by pointing out that “the act of sending unsolicited pictures of one’s genitals seems to be relatively exclusive to those who have a penis.”

The Canadian study explores motives for sending dick pics. The researchers asked 1,087 heterosexual men whether they had ever sent dick pics and why. Of these, 523 (48%) reported that they had sent pictures of their penis to women. They were then asked about their reasons for sending the pictures and about the desired reaction of the recipient of the picture. Every participant could tick off several answers. 
The most common reason, chosen by 53% of the senders, was to have sent dick pics “in the hopes of turning someone on”. In the same category, many reported to have sent dick pics as a normal way of flirting and to let someone know that they had a sexual interest in them.
The second most common reason was transactional: 51% of senders reported having sent dick pics “hoping to receive sexy pictures in return”. Only a minority of senders (less than 10%) reported more vicious reasons, like misogyny or the feeling of power by forcing women to see their penis.
In a second questionnaire, senders were asked about the expected reaction from the receiver. A large majority reported that they hoped the receiver would "feel sexual excitement" (82%), or that she would "feel attractive" (50%) or "valued" (22%). In other words, the dick pic was sent to flatter the receiver by letting her know that the sender was turned on by her. The picture was considered a genuine compliment.
Only a minority of men used the images as a form of harassment, hoping for shock (17%), fear (15%) or disgust (11%).

There are many other interesting conclusions in the study by Oswald; for instance the fact that men seem to overrate their own sexual attractiveness and erroneously assume sexual interest from women where there is none. And by finding that senders of dick pics have more narcissistic tendencies than men who don't send dick pics. The mere fact that the study applies MANOVA statistics to penises and unresolved childhood conflicts should - well - arouse you.
Oswald and her colleagues conclude that "the dick pic lies at the intersection of the zeitgeists surrounding consent, gender, sexuality and technology."

But for now, let us focus on the motivation. It appears that dick pics are sent to flatter someone by showing her the effect she has on the sender. 
And I cannot help but feel sympathy for these men. I imagine 22-year old Michael sitting in his dorm room in Toronto hoping to impress a young woman from his psychology class. So he sends her a picture of his erection. Probably captioned "You're so sexy. As demonstrated by my excitement shown here." He means this genuinely. The study tells us that he really feels, this is a fine way to woo her.

Does it work? Will his gesture spark romantic feelings in the girl of his dreams? How does 22-year old Cynthia react on receiving a picture of the erection on Michael from psychology class?

Well, there is another study to tell us just that.
By asking 2,045 women about unsolicited advances from men, researchers from Indiana University found that almost half of all women had received dick pics. The reactions were not very positive. Most women felt grossed out (49%), disrespected (46%), violated (28%) or sad (6%). Some were confused (18%), some were bored (8%), and some were entertained (16%). Only a small minority of women reported to have been flattered (6%) or aroused (7%) by receiving dick pics.
The researchers concluded that the primarily cisgender male activity of sending unsolicited genital images could be a way for men to construct and perform their masculinity, while women’s negative reactions could be linked to hegemonic gender expectations. Or to put it less sciency: Men are expected to be sexually aggressive and show off, while women are expected to be passive.

This is all just bad news for Michael in Toronto. He overperceives his own sexual attractiveness, and he thinks that Cynthia will feel flattered by seeing the effect she has on him. But he is far too explicit, and she feels harassed by his disregard of her privacy.

And that is what really fascinates me about these studies; that men and women have so diverse perceptions on this form of communication. If men genuinely feel that dick pics are a fine way of flirting, and women are totally grossed out by it, we are obviously talking two different languages. Somewhere the message changes meaning from sender to receiver.
If this is true for something as basic as dick pics, it must be applicable to other forms of communication between the genders. In pictures, in words, in body language or by touch. 
What a man conveys to a woman, and what he expects her to understand, is very different from how she actually interprets the message. They would both react with disbelief if they knew the intended meaning or the received interpretation.
And because men overperceive their own sexuality, it might be safe to assume that the reverse is also true; women communicating with men will be misunderstood. I don’t have the data to show it, but I would expect that a friendly statement from a woman would easily be misinterpreted as a sexual suggestion by the receiving man.
A compliment turns into an insult. An invitation turns into a rejection. And neither parts get it right.

I find comfort in the fact that in spite of these differences, men and women still manage to have sex and reproduce. So at least some forms of communication work.
And with the feminist movements of the 20th century and the #MeToo movement of 2017, for the first time in millennia, we might finally be developing a common language for gender, sex and sexuality.

In the meantime, Mike, just go buy her some flowers.

________________________________________

Oswald F, Lopes A, Skoda K, Hesse CL, Pedersen CL: I’ll Show You Mine so You’ll Show Me Yours: Motivations and Personality Variables in Photographic Exhibitionism. The Journal of Sex Research. 2019.
Marcotte AS, Gesselman AN, Fisher HE, Garcia JR: Women’s and Men’s Reactions to Receiving Unsolicited Genital Images from Men. The Journal of Sex Research. 2020.
Nielsen AK: Pikfang. WeekendAvisen. 2019.
________________________________________



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Sunday, 20 December 2020

Saul and Paul and Jesus and Christ


A man travels from Jerusalem to Damascus. He is a religious man, he is accompanied by a small entourage. His mission is by mandate from the High Priest; he is going to Damascus to arrest followers of Jesus and bring them to Jerusalem for trial and possibly execution. His name is Saul, and he is fanatic in his persecution of Christians.
At this point in his life, he has already been an accomplice in the stoning of Stephen. He has imprisoned followers of Jesus in Jerusalem, destroyed their church and scattered its members across Judea. If he has any feelings of remorse or theological scruples, it is certainly not clear from the text. He is described as angry and ambitious [Acts of the Apostles 8:1 and 9:1].

But then something happens:


As he neared Damascus on his journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”
“Who are you, Lord?” Saul asked.
“I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,” he replied. “Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.”
The men traveling with Saul stood there speechless; they heard the sound but did not see anyone. Saul got up from the ground, but when he opened his eyes he could see nothing. So they led him by the hand into Damascus. For three days he was blind, and did not eat or drink anything.

[Acts 9:3-9, NIV]


The experience changes Saul's beliefs entirely. In Damascus, Saul is baptized, and he begins to preach that Jesus is the Christ. Due to his previous reputation of persecuting Christians, he is initially met with distrust. But his preaching is convincing, his faith is pure. Later, he changes his name to Paul. He travels most of the ancient world, visiting congregations or establishing churches. His writings - along with the gospels - lay out the very foundation of Christianity.


The story of the revelation on the road to Damascus is retold three times in Acts of the Apostles [Acts 9:3-13, 22:6-21, 26:12-26] and several times in the following letters [1st Corinthians 15:3-8, Galatians 1:11-16, Philippians 3:4-6].
To a man in the first century, it is divine intervention. A miracle.
To a 21st century neurologist, this experience is a typical description of an epileptic complex partial seizure.

Epileptic seizures are often depicted as violent convulsions agitating the whole body, causing wide opened eyes, salivation and contorted grimaces of the face. An epileptic seizure is a dramatic event, and bystanders are often horrified by the uncontrolled motor spasms.
I have met a lot of scared people in my work, but never anyone more scared than parents who have just witnessed their child having an epileptic seizure. It looks horrible. The condition is most often self limiting, but it can become life threatening.

Epilepsy is caused by excessive and uncontrolled discharges of neurons in the brain. The discharges can originate in any small site in the brain, but they will often spread out over the entire cortex of the brain, like a small underwater earthquake causing a massive and devastating tsunami. The involvement of larger areas of the brain will cause loss of consciousness. When the motor area of the brain is involved, rhythmic convulsions occur.
But the excessive discharge of neurons can occur in any part of the brain, and can be limited to the specific functions of that area. For instance, epileptic activity originating in the sensory cortex will cause an experience of changed sensation as a numbness or tingling feeling in the skin, often crawling across the skin as the discharges spread through the different sensory areas in the brain. If the epileptic focus is in the occipital lobe, where visual input is enterpritated, the epileptic seizure may take the form of flashes of light or moving colours.
After the fit, the affected part of the brain may be exhausted. Motor spasms can leave part of the body paralyzed for hours or days. Speech may be inhibited after a seizure, and interestingly, a seizure involving the occipital lobe can leave the patient completely blind for days.

The temporal lobe of the brain is a complex structure. It holds functional areas responsible for the interpretation of language, for sounds and smells, and for memory.
An epileptic seizure originating in the temporal lobe can cause a variety of psychic experiences or changed perceptions. Visual and auditory hallucinations are common, changed perception of sizes are well described as micropsia (everything looks small) or macropsia (everything looks large), and altered memory can be experienced as déjà vue (something not previously occurred seems familiar) or jamais vécu (something familiar seems uncommon).
One patient told me of seizures characterized by a certain music playing in his head, always pleasant and accompanied by a feeling of joy. He would recognize the music at the onset of the seizure, but to his own regret, he could not recall the piece of music when the epileptic activity had passed. Another patient described the recurring feelings of jamais vécu as utterly unpleasant, as she would not recognize her husband or children or home during a seizure, and consequently she felt alarmed and threatened. 
Temporal lobe epilepsy may cause emotional experiences only. The seizures may take the form of dramatic feelings of anger and aggressiveness. One patient feared his seizures because he would react with uncontrolled rage and violence, and he would repeatedly be brought to the hospital handcuffed and escorted by the police. But the opposite may also occur with an epileptic seizure causing feelings of joy and ecstatic wellbeing, some patients even describing the seizures as religious revelations or heavenly bliss. Ecstatic seizures are rare, but one famous epileptic, Russian writer Dostoevsky, described one as the touch of God:

The air was filled with a big noise and I tried to move. I felt Heaven was coming down upon the earth and that it engulfed me. I have really touched God. He came into me myself, yes God exists, I cried, and I don't remember anything else. You all, healthy people ... can't imagine the happiness which we epileptics feel during the second before our fit. ... I don't know if this felicity lasts for seconds, hours or months, but believe me, for all the joys that life may bring, I would not exchange this one.


Epileptics are scattered throughout all of Dostoevsky’s authorship, probably most famously as Prince Myshkin in The Idiot. The condition also helped the writer himself out of the army; an artist with temporal lobe seizures and armed with a gun was a convincingly bad idea.


It is easy to see the similarities between Dostoevsky's description of a temporal lobe epileptic seizure and the revelation experienced by Saul.
It can be speculated that Saul had an epileptic seizure originating in the left temporal lobe, bringing him to an ecstatic state of wellbeing and an overwhelming feeling of divinity. The epileptic activity seems to have spread backwards across the lobe involving areas of speech perception, leading to the auditory hallucinations of a conversation with Jesus. Finally, the epileptic discharges would involve the occipital lobe, leaving Saul blinded for days after the exhaustive activity.
It is difficult to establish Saul as an epileptic. After his conversion there is no further mention of episodes that could constitute epileptic seizures. However, throughout Paul’s letters to his congregations, he often mentions his own illness, a condition whose characteristics never become quite clear.
It has been suggested that epileptics with temporal lobe seizures have a certain personality. They are described as circumstantial and tedious in conversation, inclined to mysticism and preoccupied with rather naive religious or philosophical ideas. Obsessionalism, a tendency to paranoia and mood swings with aggressive outburst have also been ascribed to patients with temporal lobe epilepsy. Behavioral abnormalities as hyposexuality (diminished sexual interest), hypergraphia (increased productivity in writing) and hyperreligiosity have all been suggested in the condition. The obvious inspiration for these personality traits is Dostoevsky, but it has also been speculated that Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and the composer Mozart owed their impressive productivity to temporal lobe epilepsy.
The suggested personality traits in epilepsy have been disputed and remains to be clarified. Nevertheless, the characteristics of a religious man with an almost compulsive urge to write could certainly also be applied to Paul.

In the first century, theological fractions within the Jewish community were accepted, and Christianity was originally a sect of Judaism. There was nothing especially captivating about the preachings of Jesus, nothing scandalous in his disputes with older rabbis or radical in his interpretations of the laws. Young men claiming to be prophets or even the Messiah were not uncommon. That the gospel of Jesus should reach thousands and become a worldwide religion was not inevitable. Especially as Jesus himself did not write down a single word of his teachings.
The theological thinking of Jesus was conveyed by apostles. And no one would be more instrumental in the interpretation and dissemination of his words than Paul.

Jesus as man’s final sacrifice to God, the ultimate sacrifice to reconcile man and God for eternity, was not a message easily understood. Neither was the abandonment of the strict rules of Judaism to introduce a religion of faith only, a religion allowing the inclusion of tribes and peoples other than the direct descendants of Abraham. But in the writings of Paul, the promises were explicit and crystal clear: After the sacrifice, all men were forgiven.
This promise of salvation and resurrection was addressed in Paul’s letters to the congregations, most easily accessible in the Epistle to the Romans (56 CE), and most beautifully composed in the First Epistle to the Corinthians (54 CE). The promise, its pitfalls and its consequences, was thoroughly considered by Paul, and he conveyed it elegantly. Paul's writings would be the pillar of Christianity and its dissemination.
It took a profound and dedicated thinker to turn the preachings and parables of a young rebel into a comprehensive and organized theology. It took Paul to turn Jesus into Christ.

On that road to Damascus, Saul had a revelation. He heard the voice of Jesus. After this, he converted to Christianity and changed his name to Paul. He travelled from Judea through Anatolia and Greece, meeting congregations and preaching in churches. He was imprisoned and sent to Rome, where he was finally executed. Throughout his travels and his imprisonment, he wrote a detailed and well-organized theology. He introduced the radically new message of salvation, justification and sanctification through faith in God, and he introduced the promise of resurrection. There was no pain or death, only martyrdom and salvation. Salvation was obtainable for anyone of faith. Paul gave Christianity its essence and its appeal. After him, this religion was irrepressible.
Persecutions would follow, wars would be fought. But the promise of eternal life in return for faith was received with gratitude by the thousands living in poverty or under oppression. This idea would prevail. Within three centuries, Roman Emperor Constantine the Great adapted the religion, decriminalized Christianity and was baptized. In 380, Christianity was declared the state religion of the Roman Empire.

And I would like to think that these events, these world changing thoughts and movements, these ideas of faith and forgiveness, were all caused by a small epileptic discharge in the neurons of the left temporal lobe in the brain of an ambitious man.


I wish you all a merry Christmas and peace on Earth.
______________________

Landsborough D: St Paul and temporal lobe epilepsy. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry. 1987.
Ropper AH, Brown RH: Adams and Victor's Principles of Neurology (8th Edition). McGraw-Hill. 2005.
Iniesta I: Epilepsy in the process of artistic creation of Dostoevsky. Neurologia. 2011.
Sacks O: Seeing God in the Third Millennium. The Atlantic. 2012.
Wood J: The Radical Origins of Christianity. The New Yorker. 2017.
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