A&O QUOTE – Dostoyevsky’s ecstatic experience
“IT WAS one of the most profound experiences of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s life. “A happiness unthinkable in the normal state and unimaginable for anyone who hasn’t experienced it… I am then in perfect harmony with myself and the entire universe,” he told his friend, Russian philosopher Nikolai Strakhov. What lay behind such feelings? The description might suggest a religious awakening – but Dostoevsky was instead describing the moments before a full-blown epileptic seizure.
Those sensations seem to have informed the character of Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s novel, The Idiot. “I would give my whole life for this one instant,” the prince says of the brief moment at the start of his epileptic fit – a moment “overflowing with unbounded joy and rapture, ecstatic devotion, and completest life”.
For a long time, the novelist was thought to be exercising his artistic licence and exaggerating this “ecstatic aura”, rather than accurately representing a real phenomenon. Most epileptic attacks are terrifying, after all, and many people with epilepsy would give a lot not to experience another. But as more and more people with the condition have come forward reporting the same feelings, there has been a renewed interest in this “Dostoevsky syndrome” – and neuroscientists are now on the hunt for the cause.
Besides explaining those feelings of bliss experienced by Dostoevsky and other people with “ecstatic epilepsy”, their investigations could also open a window on self-awareness more generally. The question is, are there safe ways we could all be transported to similar states of being?” Excerpt from A&O READING on Ecstatic Epilepsy by Anil Ananthaswamy (2014)[i]
“Epilepsy and Ecstatic Experiences: The Role of the Insula“ was explored by Picard, Bossaerts, and Bartolomei (2021) in Brain Sci. doi: 10.3390/brainsci11111384 : Abstract: “Ecstatic epilepsy is a rare form of focal epilepsy in which the aura (beginning of the seizures) consists of a blissful state of mental clarity/feeling of certainty. Such a state has also been described as a “religious” or mystical experience. While this form of epilepsy has long been recognized as a temporal lobe epilepsy, we have accumulated evidence converging toward the location of the symptomatogenic zone in the dorsal anterior insula during the 10 last years. The neurocognitive hypothesis for the genesis of a mental clarity is the suppression of the interoceptive prediction errors and of the unexpected surprise associated with any incoming internal or external signal, usually processed by the dorsal anterior insula. This mimics a perfect prediction of the world and induces a feeling of certainty. The ecstatic epilepsy is thus an amazing model for the role of anterior insula in uncertainty and surprise.”
[i] Anil Ananthaswamy (2014) Ecstatic epilepsy: How seizures can be bliss. NEW SCIENTIST. 24 January 2014, issue 2953:44-47. The article quoted appeared in print under the headline “Fits of rapture” … Anil Ananthaswamy is a consultant for New Scientist
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NEXUS:
- Excerpts from “Ecstatic epilepsy: How seizures can be bliss” by Anil Ananthaswamy
- DOSTOYEVSKI’s epilepsy QUOTE
- Dostoyevski’s ecstatic experience
NOTE: more recent information at
- Picard F, Bossaerts P, Bartolomei F. Epilepsy and Ecstatic Experiences: The Role of the Insula. Brain Sci. 2021 Oct 22;11(11):1384. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8615543/ (“The neurocognitive hypothesis for the genesis of a mental clarity is the suppression of the interoceptive prediction errors and of the unexpected surprise associated with any incoming internal or external signal, usually processed by the dorsal anterior insula. This mimics a perfect prediction of the world and induces a feeling of certainty.”)
- Markus Gschwind and Fabienne Picard (2014) Ecstatic Epileptic Seizures – the Role of the Insula in Altered Self-Awareness. Epileptologie 2014; 31
