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to Christ. The brain waves recorded from electrodes deep in her brain demonstrated transient episodes of spiking in a midline limbic structure called the septum and in the right hippocampus, deep in the temporal lobe. Paul MacLean and others since have shown that electrical stimulation of these and related brain regions could produce pleasure and grooming reactions in cats and prolonged penile erections in squirrel monkeys.

Many years later, I spoke about Donna with the Harvard professor of neurology, Norman Geschwind. He took me to his twice a week epilepsy clinic. In an effort to demonstrate what is now known as the Geschwind Syndromes of between seizure, inter-ictal personality changes in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy, he stood in front of the patients’ waiting room. In a loud voice, he asked that all people keeping diaries and personal notebooks please stand up. Several did so, some displaying their notebooks in outstretched hands. The pages that I saw were filled mostly with religious writing, biblical quotations and exclamation points. Gathering the positive responders together, he asked them in turn what religion they were. Several answered the question with the question, “When?” It turned out that many reported having several experiences of religious conversion. Geschwind called them “Jamesian Episodes” after William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience. He then asked when was the last time they engaged in sexual activity. For most of them, including those that were married, it had been years. Thought the men said they were not impotent, experiencing early morning spontaneous erections, they claimed a complete loss of interest in sex though feeling warmly affectionate toward people generally. As he anticipated, the patients were emotionally intense and unstoppably loquacious, needing to speak at length about their moral philosophies. They persisted in following us around the clinic waiting room, several speaking at once. In his lectures and papers, Geschwind called this last feature, difficulty in separation, interpersonal “stickiness.” First reported by the French electroencephalographer, Henri Gastaut, a history of multiple ecstatic religious experiences, increasing emotional intensity and lability, hyposexualilty (not impotence), moralizing religiosity, compulsive and frequently poetic writing and tendency to cling to people is now called the Geschwind Syndrome of temporal lobe

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