Heaven is for neuroscience: How the brain creates visions of God

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In the 1730s, just after turning forty, Swedenborg took up neuroanatomy. Instead of actually dissecting brains, though, he got himself a comfy armchair and began leafing through a mountain of books. Based solely on this inquiry, he developed some remarkably prescient ideas. His theory about the brain containing millions of small, independent bits connected by fibers anticipated the neuron doctrine; he correctly deduced that the corpus callosum allows the left and right hemispheres to communicate; and he determined that the pituitary gland serves as “a chymical laboratory.” In each case Swedenborg claimed that he’d merely drawn some obvious conclusions from other people’s research. In reality, he radically reinterpreted the neuroscience of the time, and most everyone he cited would have condemned him as a luna- and/or heretic.

The history of neuroscience might look quite different if Swedenborg had pursued these studies. But in 1743 he began to fall into mystical trances. Faces and angels hovered before him in visions, thunder pealed in his ears; he even smelled hallucinatory odors and felt odd tactile sensations. In the midst of these trances he often fell down shuddering, and an innkeeper in London once found him wrapped in a velvet nightgown, frothing at the mouth and babbling in Latin about being crucified to save the Jews. Swedenborg woke up insisting he’d touched God, and at different times claimed to have conversed with Jesus, Aristotle, Abraham, and inhabitants of the five other planets. (Uranus and Neptune hadn’t been discovered yet, or he surely would have met Uranians and Neptunians, too.) Sometimes the visions revealed answers to scientific mysteries, such as how bodies eaten by worms will nevertheless be reconstituted on Judgment Day. Other trances were more casual, like the time he brunched with angels, and discovered that some angels hate butter. Yet another time God pulled a mean joke and turned Swedenborg’s hair into a Medusa’s nest of snakes. Compared to such intense visions the cerebral pleasures of science had no chance, and from 1744 onward he devoted his life to chronicling these revelations.

Swedenborg died in 1772, and history has returned a split verdict on his legacy. His eclectic dream diaries charmed the likes of Coleridge, Blake, Goethe, and Yeats. Kant, meanwhile, dismissed Swedenborg as “the arch-fanatic of all fanatics.” Many other observers were similarly baffled. What could transform a gifted and reserved gentleman scientist into someone whom John Wesley called “one of the most ingenious, lively, entertaining madmen that ever set pen to paper”? The answer may be epilepsy.

At its most basic level epilepsy involves neurons firing when they shouldn’t and stirring up storms of electrical activity inside the brain. Neurons can misfire for many reasons. Some misfit neurons were born with misshapen membrane channels and can’t regulate the flow of ions in and out. Other times, when axons suffer damage, neurons start discharging spontaneously, like frayed electrical wires. Sometimes these disturbances remain local, and just one location in the brain goes on the fritz, a so-called partial seizure. In other cases, the seizure short-circuits the entire brain and leads to either a grand mal or a petit mal seizure. Grand mals (now called tonic-clonic seizures) start with muscular rigidity and end with the stereotypical thrashing and foaming; they’re what most of us think of when we think of epilepsy. Petit mals avoid the thrashing but usually cause “absences,” in which the victim freezes up and her mind goes blank for a spell. (William McKinley’s wife, Ida, suffered from petit mals. During state dinners McKinley sometimes just draped a napkin over her face and blustered through the next few minutes to divert attention.)

The triggers for epileptic fits can be bizarrely specific: noxious perfume, flashing lights, mah-jongg tiles, Rubik’s cubes, wind instruments, parasitic worms. Although potentially embarrassing, seizures don’t always compromise someone’s quality of life — and in rare cases, people benefit. Some first-time seizure victims find that they can suddenly draw much better or that they now appreciate poetry. Some folk (but only women so far — sorry, guys) orgasm during seizures. Specific triggers aside, seizures do erupt most commonly during times of stress or psychological turmoil. Probably the best example of this is Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Heaven is for neuroscience: How the brain creates visions of God - Salon.com

This is a rather interesting article.