Ed Wilson and Mania

• Manic Traits: An EP/SB Description by James Brody, 4/5/97
  
  

"Consilience" notes on p. 108. "Patients with temporal lobe epilepsy often develop hyperreligiosity, the tendency to charge all events, large and small, with cosmic significance. They are also prone to hypergraphia, a compulsion to express their visions in an undisciplined stream of poems, letters, or stories."

oh my.

I think of Kay Jamison's personal feats plus her narrative ("Touched with Fire") about poets and painters. Probably should lump some theologians in with them. Anyhow, Wilson's comment (and any data) seem to relate to mania and depakote or tegretol (both anticonvulsants). And possibly to risperidone and it's possible effects on 5HT2A? receptors in the temporal area? And possibly to temporal sites in the regulation of "self-esteem"?

Could it be that the "need for the sacred" that Wilson describes can be traced to temporal firing. I'm amazed that he didn't pick up on the similarity.

Gosh, what great times! It's a lot of fun watching the broth simmer and congeal; someday all this stuff will tie together in an isomorphic fashion.

Kauffman might put it that chaos drops, consilience builds, and a new stasis is attained. Margulis perhaps would liken the phenomenon to bubbling kefir, a yogurt-like food and the cooperative product of thousands of kinds of bacteria.

• Temporally Driven Essays by James Brody, 4/21/98