Medicine
Neuroscience & Mind
From Seizures, a Healthy Respect for the Brain
At Psyche, Webb Wright shares his thoughts about how the sudden onset of epilepsy while he was a college student gave him insights into consciousness. But first it really terrified him:
As it spread, my consciousness warped. My surroundings were suffused with a vibrant, colourful energy; I looked at the reflection of the overhead LED lights on the rows of plastic bottles in front of me and saw them glittering with beautiful intensity; the mechanical hum of the refrigerator seemed to melt into distinct layers of sound; my body was burning in a way that wasn’t entirely unpleasant. But amid these dreamlike sensations, there was also a sharp sense of fear: I felt suspended in space and time, like a fly in amber, unable to move or think.
“Having epileptic seizures gave me newfound respect for the brain,” April 3, 2025
Fighting Back
Later, he suffered panic attacks at even slight dizzy spells, as doctors couldn’t identify the cause of the grand mal seizures. But he resolved to fight back by investigating the type of consciousness (the “aura”) that precedes unconsciousness:
To be clear, the prospect of losing consciousness and writhing helplessly on the ground again was terrifying. But in the build-up to that terrible crescendo, there had been a few shining moments of liberation. The ceaseless ruminations of my mind – my memories of the past, the treadmill of my present concerns, and my nebulous fears about the future — had been silenced. Now, consumed with anxiety, I craved that relief more than ever.
“Newfound respect for the brain”
Wright’s roundup of historical approaches to epilepsy is not very insightful, unfortunately. For example, “Some have speculated that Christian luminaries such as Saint Paul, Joan of Arc and Mother Teresa may also have experienced religious epiphanies during seizures.” There is no evidence for these claims; they are a clumsy attempt to ascribe material causes to clearly spiritual experiences that had profound later outcomes.
A Writer’s Gift
That said, his account of personally experiencing a seizure is outstanding. We should be grateful. Most people who have seizures don’t have a writer’s gift for describing them.
And he learned, as he says, to respect his brain:
In order to function normally, this organ depends on the cooperation of more than 80 billion neurons. Each of those neurons is connected to thousands of others, resulting in an incomprehensibly complex network of electrical communication that somehow produces subjective experience. Until that first seizure, when that network broke down into chaos, I’d always imagined myself as a conductor, voluntarily controlling the orchestra of my entire conscious experience. Afterwards I came to realise that I’m not the conductor, nor am I the arrangement of musicians. Rather, I’m the music. And like any well-composed piece of music, my everyday, conscious experience is a delicate and precious thing…
Like people throughout history, I could choose to regard my seizures as a terrifying loss of agency or as a glimpse into a higher state of being. They were both, simultaneously, but I’ve strived to focus on the latter. Today, they feel less like a death and more like an awakening.
“Newfound respect for the brain”
Perhaps the secret of free will is recognizing that we have it.
In The Immortal Mind (Worthy June 3, 2025), neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and I discuss the ways in which the study of epilepsy has contributed to our understanding of the human mind in general.