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<\/a><\/p>\nDostoyevsky grew frantic, especially when a friend pointed to a cart filled with what looked like coffins. Soldiers meanwhile marched the crew\u2019s ringleaders to the posts and covered their eyes with white hoods. The gunmen raised their rifles. A minute of agony passed. Suddenly the rifles dropped, and a messenger clattered up on horseback, carrying a pardon. In reality Nicholas had staged the entire scene to teach the punks a lesson, but the stress unhinged Dostoyevsky. And after he\u2019d spent a few months in a labor camp (the czar didn\u2019t let them of THAT easy), the abusive guards and harsh weather finally pushed him over the edge, and he had his first major fit \u2013 shrieking, foaming, convulsions, the whole production.<\/p>\n
That first seizure lowered the threshold inside Dostoyevsky\u2019s brain, and after that, any mild stressor, mental or physical, could fell him. Guzzling champagne could trigger fits, as could staying up all night to write or losing money at roulette. Even conversations could detonate him. During a philosophical bull session with a friend in 1863, Dostoyevsky began pacing back and forth, waving his arms and raving about some point. Suddenly he staggered. His face contorted and his pupils dilated, and when he opened his mouth a groan escaped: his chest muscles had contracted and forced the air out. The seizure that followed was intense. A similar incident occurred a few years later, when he collapsed onto the divan in his wife\u2019s family\u2019s living room and began howling. (This couldn\u2019t have impressed the in-laws.) Dreams could set him off as well, after which he usually wet the bed. Dostoyevsky compared the seizures to demonic possession, and he often plumbed the agony of them in his writing, including epileptic characters in\u00a0The Brothers Karamazov<\/em>,\u00a0The Insulted and Injured<\/em>, and\u00a0The Idiot<\/em>.<\/p>\n Dostoyevsky almost certainly had temporal lobe epilepsy. (The temporal lobes sit behind your temples and wrap laterally around the brain, somewhat like earmuffs.) Not all temporal lobe epileptics thrash and foam, but many of them do experience a distinctive aura. Auras are sights, sounds, smells, or tingles that appear during the onset of seizures \u2013 a portent of worse things to come. Most epileptics experience auras of some sort, and most non-temporal lobe epileptics find them unpleasant: some unlucky folk smell burning feces, feel ants crawling beneath their skin, or pass horrendous gas. But for some reason \u2013 perhaps because the nearby limbic structures get revved up \u2013 auras that originate in the temporal lobes feel emotionally richer and often supernaturally charged. Some victims even feel their \u201csouls\u201d uniting with the godhead. (No wonder ancient doctors called epilepsy the sacred disease. For his part, Dostoyevsky\u2019s seizures were preceded by a rare \u201cecstatic aura\u201d in which he felt a bliss so intense it ached. As he told a friend, \u201cSuch joy would be inconceivable in ordinary life\u2026 complete harmony in myself and in the whole world.\u201d Afterward he felt shattered: bruised, depressed, haunted by thoughts of evil and guilt (familiar motifs in his fiction). But Dostoyevsky insisted the hardship was worth it: \u201cFor a few seconds of such bliss I would give ten or more years of my life, even my whole life.\u201d<\/p>\n Culled from:\u00a0The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Yosuke Yamahata photographed the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 10, 1945.\u00a0 Here’s one of his haunting images from the book\u00a0Nagasaki Journey: The Photographs of Yosuke Yamahata, August 10, 1945<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nDostoyevsky in his later years.<\/em><\/p>\nGhastly!<\/h3>\n