I am reading a great book at the moment. It is by Daniel Tammet (Born on a Blue Day) who is an austic savant with extraordinary abilities for numbers and language learning. He also had some episodes, as a child, of temporal lobe epilepsy.
In it he quotes Dostoevsky speaking about his experience of epilepsy:
'For several instants I experienced a happiness that is impossible in any ordinary state, and of which other people have no conception. I feel full of harmony in myself and in the whole world, and the feeling is so strong and sweet that for a few seconds of such bliss one could give up ten years of life, perhaps all of life.
I felt that heaven descended to earth and swallowed me. I really attained god and was imbued with him. All of you healthy people don't even suspect what happiness is, that happiness that we epileptics experience for a second before an attack.'
Tammet also writes about a Professor Allan Snyder from the Centre of the Mind at the university of Sydney who claims he can reproduce savant type thinking by using a technique called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. Here I am quoting from Tammet talking about Snyder:
'By temporarily inhibiting some brain activity - the ability to think contextually and conceptually, for example - TMS Professor Snyder argues, can be used to induce heightened access to parts of the brain responsible for collecting raw, unfiltered information'.
In it he quotes Dostoevsky speaking about his experience of epilepsy:
'For several instants I experienced a happiness that is impossible in any ordinary state, and of which other people have no conception. I feel full of harmony in myself and in the whole world, and the feeling is so strong and sweet that for a few seconds of such bliss one could give up ten years of life, perhaps all of life.
I felt that heaven descended to earth and swallowed me. I really attained god and was imbued with him. All of you healthy people don't even suspect what happiness is, that happiness that we epileptics experience for a second before an attack.'
Tammet also writes about a Professor Allan Snyder from the Centre of the Mind at the university of Sydney who claims he can reproduce savant type thinking by using a technique called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. Here I am quoting from Tammet talking about Snyder:
'By temporarily inhibiting some brain activity - the ability to think contextually and conceptually, for example - TMS Professor Snyder argues, can be used to induce heightened access to parts of the brain responsible for collecting raw, unfiltered information'.