Epilepsy Talk

How Creative Are YOU?  | July 12, 2024

I was born a writer.  Just like I was born with brown eyes.  In 5th grade when we were assigned to write a poem with an illustration, everyone wrote about the spring, flowers, stars, the city, the country. I wrote about racism.  My illustration was a black silhouette pasted against white paper.  My teacher promptly sent me home with a note for my parents, accusing me of plagiarism.

I continued to write now and then, winning the occasional essay contest, bringing home a poetry prize, encouraged by my mother.  But it wasn’t until I turned 14, that I really started to pick up steam.  That’s also when I was diagnosed with epilepsy.

Did I become a writer (which I still am, professionally) because I had epilepsy or was it a mere coincidence?

That seems to be up for conjecture…

There can definitely be a creative side to the electrical mischief that epilepsy produces.  Some types of epilepsy can spark inspiration, enhance creativity and bring out the latent artist in you.  It can be as diverse as literature…poetry…painting…drawing…dramatics…architecture…philosophy…or physics…to name just a few.

Researchers claim that often these surprise talents are associated with temporal lobe epilepsy.

In this case, the sides of the brain, where memory and feelings reside, are intermittently seized by those “electrical storms” which produce the spark. Although the seizures may be undetectable to observers, they can prompt hallucinations, religion, fury, fear, joy and an unquenchable desire to create, even after the seizure is over.

So you may not know it, but you may have some surprise artistic talents hidden away.

Give it a try.  Dabble a little.  Try a little drawing, painting, writing.

It’s exciting, energizing, rewarding, all-encompassing, and I must admit, a wonderful escape.

Like making lemons out of lemonade!

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Resources:

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/12/science/in-the-temporal-lobes-seizures-and-creativity.html?pagewanted=1

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26831642

http://www.epilepsybehavior.com/article/S1525-5050(16)00004-4/abstract

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15326934crj1601_3?journalCode=hcrj20

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