Welcome to the Coping With Epilepsy forums - a peer support community for folks dealing (directly or indirectly) with seizure disorders. You can visit the forum page to see the list of forum nodes (categories/rooms) for topics.
Please have a look around and if you like what you see, please consider registering an account and joining the discussions. When you register an account and log in, you may enjoy additional benefits including no ads, access to members only (ie. private) forum nodes and more. Registering an account is free - you have nothing to lose!
The involvement of the temporal lobes in DID is not surprising, in light of connections between the temporal lobe and the limbic system. The latter includes the amygdale, which is involved in the processing of emotional responses and in particular fear, and the hippocampus, which is vital to memory storage. In theory, the patient was able to induce dissociative states seemingly at will, presumably by increased volitional inputs involving neurons in other cortical areas-the temporal lobe has heightened sensitivity to electrical stimulation from other neurons—and when emerging from a dissociative state did appear confused and disoriented.
One possible interpretation of these observations would be that the dissociative condition was in fact a form of temporal lobe seizure. This is of interest in that the temporal lobe is more prone to seizure activity than any other lobe of the cortex. Patients with temporal lobe epilepsy may exhibit traits that define the Geschwind syndrome): Hypergraphia, emotional volatility, altered sexuality (usually decreased), over-inclusiveness, and extreme talkativeness related to excessive attention to detail. The patient in both her baseline and altered states exhibited all of these traits; her hypergraphia was especially noteworthy wherein she produced numerous letters by her dominant self and purportedly by her “alter” enactments. In addition, temporal lobe seizures are notable for producing states of altered consciousness, including those in which the sense of personal identity may disappear and a person may experience “out of body” experiences as well as free-floating feelings of doom or ecstasy. Indeed, behaviors that give the verisimilitude of personality change can be evoked in individuals with temporal lobe epilepsy. We do not claim that the patient in our study evinced temporal lobe seizures; but her ostensive changes of identity did have aspects that seemed “seizure-like;” indeed, behaviors that give the verisimilitude of personality change can be evoked in individuals with temporal lobe epilepsy. This suggests as a possible avenue of intervention the use of medication (that has not been tried hitherto) such as Trileptal, which is useful in the treatment of temporal lobe epilepsy.
... I'm back to the hypergraphia, which is probably most noticeable here, where I have been responding all over the forum, even to dead threads like this one.
...