Epilepsy and meditation: two paths to “everything is as it should be”

So, I was reading along in In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment by Jo Marchant, which I’ve been blogging about recently, and came to a passage that reminded me of a post I wrote a few weeks ago, “What if everything is okay just as it is?” I described the feeling:

There are moments when we look upon life not as a series of problems to be solved, but as a complete answer lacking even the need for a question.

Sex, drugs, rock and roll. These can lead to such moments. So can meditation, nature, exercise, travel, music, art. Anything that leads us away from our habitual sense of “what I need is…”, because what we have is all we want.

Temporarily. Which is the big problem. Everything may seem okay just as it is, but then it isn’t, and we’re back to a habitual hunger for more and better.

Marchant writes about ecstatic epilepsy seizures that have been studied by neurologist Fabienne Picard. These patients echo the feelings of a character with epilepsy in Dostoevsky’s novel, The Idiot. Dostoevsky suffered from epilepsy himself, so used his personal experience in his description of Prince Myshkin.

Myshkin too suffered from epilepsy, and Dostoevsky described how just before each of the young man’s seizures, he was overcome by a brief feeling of intense bliss. During these episodes, ‘his brain suddenly seemed to burst into flame’, and the world felt unusually vivid and clear. ‘The mind, the heart were flooded with an extraordinary light; all his unrest, all his doubts, all his anxieties were… resolved into a kind of higher calm, full of a serene, harmonious joy and hope.’

Picard found that the anterior insula in the brain was causing the bliss aura in his epilepsy patients.

Picard relates the bliss symptoms and feeling of eternal now to the anterior insula’s role in sensing and driving our internal bodily states. During ecstatic seizures, patients report feeling vividly and pleasurably aware of their bodies. Doestoevsky wrote of an inexpressible feeling of ‘voluptuousness’ and ‘sensuousness’. This is combined with a sense of clarity or correctness, with one of Picard’s patients noting: ‘Everything seems to be exactly in the right place, as it should be.’

Usually the brain’s anterior insula is comparing bottom-up sensory signals with top-down predictions of what our senses will tell us. A mismatch can create anxiety, as in “That thick brown object ahead on the trail probably is a stick; no, wait, it’s moving; yikes, snake!” Picard hypothesizes that an epileptic seizure causes neurons to fire together in lockstep, which means there’s no way to process any mismatch between the bottom-up sensory signals and the top-down predictions.

So basically, what is and what should be are in perfect harmony, resulting in a feeling that everything is all right with the world.

For a few seconds or minutes, then, the anterior insula is held in a perfectly synchronized state without any prediction error at all. Picard suggests that this manifests as a feeling of certainty and inner peace. Just for a moment, this brain state mimics perfect prediction of our body in the world. We feel that we understand everything and are in perfect control. No action or effort is required because everything already is exactly as it should be.

Well, that sounds great. Aside from the not-so-great requirement of needing to have an epileptic seizure to bring the feeling about. Thankfully, Marchant then discusses how meditation and mindfulness can result in a similar state of contentment.

Picard’s ideas raise some interesting connections with practices such as meditation. Buddhism, for example, argues that human suffering comes from our habitual attachment or aversion to feelings evoked by events we experience, and our attempts to cling to or flee from those experiences. Practitioners meditate to seek enlightenment, a state in which we’re able to let go of these desires and aversions and see reality as it truly is.

Neuroscientists have noted some intriguing similarities between meditative states and bliss auras. EEG studies of experienced meditators report an increase in synchronised high-frequency gamma waves, the same frequency range as involved in epileptic seizures. In one  of the first neuroscientific studies of meditation, reported in 2004, researchers tested Buddhist monks as they cultivated a compassionate, loving state, and were surprised to find the highest levels of synchronised gamma activity ever reported in a healthy brain.

…Seen in terms of predictive coding, emotions are dynamic, integrated models, driven by the flow of prediction errors in the anterior insula. Neuroscientist Graham Jamieson suggests that you could therefore see emotions as our experiences of the ‘unsatisfactoriness’ of each felt moment — of how our current situation departs from our predicted or desired state.

The error associated with each unsatisfactory moment captures our attention and drives the prediction-actions that propel us into the next moment. Jamieson suggests that this interpretation corresponds quite nicely with the attachment-aversion model of Buddhism. Meditation involves deliberately not attending to this dissatisfaction, he points out.

We explicitly weaken our attention to things that are bothering us and focus instead on stable and predictable patterns of bodily inputs, generated by regular breathing, mantras, and so on. It would make sense, he suggests, for this to reduce errors in the anterior insula and ultimately lead to a feeling of serenity and understanding.