Left-Brain Seizures Made Me a Writer

On language, names, and consciousness.

Sir Joshua Reynolds’ "The Death of Cardinal Beaufort” (1377-1447). From William Shakespeare's "Henry VI," Part II, Act III, Scene iii. (Hidden demon in background recently uncovered in a restoration)

What makes a person want to become a writer is a mysterious thing, maybe bad. There’s a quote I vaguely remember that says something like “A writer is a person for whom writing doesn’t come naturally.” The reason for its online popularity is probably at least a little to do with assuaging the inferiority complex of wannabe writers, but I also think there is some genuine truth to it. When you have a slight difficulty with what comes naturally to others, it’s like an irritative particle of sand that, in the right clam, may be bothered into a fine pearl.

I remember once I was waxing poetic on a Zoom call with my friend, I think about Heidegger, and he said something to the effect of “Why do you think like this?” My inner eye scanned for an origin story: I had several left-brain seizures when I was pubescent. They scared the hell out of me and made me temporarily lose my language abilities. That put a little sand in my shell.

It was an event nearly as mysterious as the birth of my own consciousness ten years or so previous. The last thing a delicate developing ego needs is a total disruption; a hard shake of the etch-a-sketch to call into question all the stable first principles other kids were happily building their book reports and times tables on. Suddenly, I’m asking weird existential questions at pep rallies like, “What does this all mean? Why are we all cheering?” and getting odd looks from other twelve-year-olds and teachers alike. I wasn’t trying to be a little Nietzsche, either. It all suddenly seemed strange to me (a lot like Sartre’s concept of “nausea”). I felt like I needed to explicitly understand the rituals in order to play along.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The seizure I can best remember, although there were more than a few others, occurred just after I got home from a camping trip. There were always two requirements to kick-starting a seizure: 1) I had to be extremely tired from days of light or little sleep and 2) I had to experience that falling sensation you sometimes get right as you’re about to leave consciousness into sleep and your body jolts you awake again almost as if from a physical drop. We used to call it a Devil’s Shove. That hypnic jerk, for reasons mysterious, was the seed of violent electrical incoherence.

The left half would catastrophically fail to come online. What happened for the next few minutes would be the panic of my brain trying to restart itself like it had a dirty carburetor. My right side (the brain is cross-wired) would spasm; every muscle would flex so hard I would bruise myself. My mouth would chatter like novelty teeth and I would moan and clench and just hold the hell on. The spasms would increase in tempo and intensity like a demon resisting exorcism. The culmination would knock me totally unconscious on most occasions. On a different occasion, I stopped breathing, so my dad rushed me to the hospital. I came to in his truck, him driving it through a ditch to get around a blockade of ambulances who had failed to find our house. I was fine by then.

This time, the worst of the tremors left me dazed but still awake. Or, at least, the silent watcher had managed to stay conscious. I’ve read a lot about hemispheric differences in split-brain patients. It has given me a way to put words to what I experienced, which is beyond normal language. By the way, if you think hemisphere differences are “pseudo-science,” that’s fine. They are cartoonishly exaggerated in pop-psychology, one side being about “creativity” and the other about “logic.” This is mostly false, but differences certainly do exist. You can read all about them in hundreds of split-brain studies, the best commentaries of which are written by Iain McGilchrist and Oliver Sacks. The closest instance to my own I’ve found is the famous “Stroke of Insight,” by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. We both experienced, for a time, what it feels like to suddenly be without a left-hemisphere.

Mine, however, did not onset during a silent stroke, but after a neurochemical laser show. The convulsions culminated beyond tolerability, flashing lights and visions of things I could not begin to understand or remember. Dostoyevsky wrote about his own full-brained seizures, which would come on in a similar way. It would be as if he were gaining more and more cosmic insight until it would become like the face of God: too powerful to look at. He would be knocked out just as he was about to grasp everything. He remarked that his life would be worth sacrificing in exchange for just one of these seizures. He borrowed the intensity of his epileptic insights to write his novels. I can see where he’s coming from, but perhaps I had too little grasp on normative reality to gain as much insight from a sudden rupture of the fabric of my own developing mind. Or maybe I just can’t remember well enough what it is that I experienced during the convulsions as well as I can remember what happened next.

Like after an intense storm, the next thing I can remember is thick quiet. So far, nothing indicated that only half of my brain is working. I have since run across the idea that the left brain holds the language of man and the right brain holds the language of the gods. I would add the emphasis of gods, meaning the pre-Abrahamic gods of dreams and shadows. The right brain is more like what it feels like to be dreaming, I mean. That helps explain why I didn’t immediately notice a profound difference in my cognition, given that I also happened to be nearly asleep a moment before the fit. Also, of course, you can ignore all kinds of perceptual weirdness after your brain has just gone haywire. Still, I can remember dimly that it felt much more like a dream than being awake. Namely, I would not have known my name if you had asked. I would hardly have been aware that I was an individual, set apart from everything around me, at all. I knew the dim orange slats of streetlighting coming through my blinds, the sound of the AC, the feel of my green waffle blanket, all as if they were an unbroken part of myself. There was no separation, but there was also no ability to be aware that there was, just minutes ago, a sense of separation that was now dissolved into the ether. I just was, if you can forgive a touch of woo.

In patients with a functioning right hemisphere and no left, there is notably much less of a deficit than in cases of the reverse. The right hemisphere seems to be in charge of receptiveness to reality itself, less in charge of abstractions we use to manipulate that reality and forge a separate self from it. Patients with an intact right hemisphere can still do relatively well on most measures of general cognition, and even sometimes outperform those with a fully functional brain. Patients with a damaged right hemisphere, on the other hand, are prone to delusion and suffer severe deficits of insight that are made worse by the fact that they are confident nothing is wrong. Some will go so far as to deny that their left side is paralyzed, not even aware of the self-delusion. If you ask them to pick up something with their left hand, they will confabulate a reason they won’t, like “I’m too tired.”

With my fully awake right hemisphere, I was dreamy and pre-verbal but totally aware of what was going on. When I tried to get out of bed, I noticed that my right side was paralyzed. I knew that I needed to somehow alert my mother in the other room. It was dark now, maybe late. I tried to speak and couldn’t muster more than a grunt. I determined to get to her bedroom. Walking, of course, was out of the question. I pushed myself upright and hopped on one leg, shocked by the alien weight on my left. I found a wall to balance against and hopped all the way to my doorway. There, I ran out of wall and promptly thumped on the (luckily) carpeted hallway. By chance, my brother was coming out of the bathroom at that very moment and saw me fall. He woke Mom and she came out and held me in her arms, searching my eyes with heartbreaking concern. “What happened?”

I fully intended to answer normally, just as when you are motivated to speak you fully intend to find the words to correspond to the unnoticed urges you wish to fulfill by speaking them. If you’re an intuitive person, you may be able to sense that you don’t really think in words, but what kicks off your search for the right words is, I think, a dream-like desire that emerges in your right hemisphere, who then cooperates with your more verbal left hemisphere to find the right language blocks to approximate that desire. Learning to make this transition from right embodied feeling to left language construct is the process of becoming a person, both in personal development from childhood and in the evolutionary development of all of humanity. If what made us human was raw cognitive horsepower, why would our brains have a massively inefficient bifurcation with two halves who do a lot of overlapping cognition, but differ importantly in their apprehension of the world? Moreover, why would the connection between these two halves decrease in proportion to our development, not increase?

Hopefully that helps you understand what I mean when I say that I fully intended to answer her normally and had no clue that I was not able. What actually came out of my mouth, if you can believe it, is something more like singing. Tone and melody. I had completely forgotten English but was still able to speak in a babble that roughly sounded like a musical or imitative of what American English might sound like to a Chinese person. It is interesting to note that anthropologists have figured out through clever deductions about the shape of early human skulls that we evolved to sing before we could speak. That’s why birds can mimic human sounds despite having a tiny brain but chimps can’t. That’s also why ancient stories like The Iliad were sung before they were written and spoken.

The horror in my mother’s eyes was enough to shut me up after a few attempts. I also remember my calm bemusement at my own inability. I suppose my right hemisphere was hanging on by its fingernails, because I quickly lost all consciousness in the safety of her arms. The next thing I remember was being fully awake again, both hemispheres online, aware of myself again as a self separate from the world. Aware of the names of everything in the world, too. You don’t realize how much names seem to make things “exist” in any real sense until you suddenly lose them and gain them again. It was over with no lasting physical damage, but I never got over what had been revealed. From that day on, I became obsessed with naming everything: the reason for Southern racial divides, types of stars, the meaning of a dialect. Less could remain comfortably unnamed to me, even if it was socially destructive and painfully self-conscious. I now wanted to know.

Something similar happens when a young child realizes that when you point to the crayon, you’re not just saying “get me that,” but you’re also saying, “that is a crayon.” There is nothing in the universe quite like that moment, and yet it happens every day. When a child realizes that things have names, he will suddenly want to know the name of everything: “What is that?” When he realizes that the linguistic symbol and the associated glottal stop somehow is the thing, he really knows the thing for the first time. After that dawn of consciousness he feels absolutely compelled to construct an entire cosmos of symbols.

This is what was actually so profound about Helen Keller’s story. In a moment, despite being deaf and blind, she is made to understand that the wet liquid is water. “Water” does not mean “perform the action of drawing the well.” It is a name. The name, in an uncomfortably real sense, makes it exist to her. After that moment, she is suddenly inducted into a “selfhood.” Like a child, she becomes obsessed with naming everything around her. I suspect that this also is why Adam’s first task is naming everything in Creation. In a more profound way than I can really understand, names pull things out of the shadowy mist and into being.

The reason I became a writer is because I had an extreme disruption in my world of names right as I was first solidifying it. This stress was like a second early childhood and a deeper suspicion that the names we give many things are flat, stale. Names reveal things, but they also hide them. Like when you say, “That’s just a crayon.” Unlike the child becoming aware of the thing for the first time, here the name is used to hide the object from your noticing. We even sometimes refuse to name things for fear of what it might reveal about us. If we name the pep rally as a sort of extravagant teenage mating ritual, for example, how can conservative parents go on allowing it? I am the sort of person then, because of a deficit, I name at a surplus.

The left brain is the crystalline labyrinth where we construct and store our sense of self. It is not a bad thing, it simply must have its names updated by the raw data from the right brain. When new experiences conflict with old names, structures must be destroyed and rebuilt. We literally feel this as pain. So, we learn to avoid that and thus fall into greater webs of delusion and estrangement, self-obsession and denial.

It would be wrong to conclude, based on this, that the left brain is the lesser or more evil of the two hemispheres. It is certainly the more dependent one, being much more likely to fall into dysfunction by itself than vice versa. But it is the seat of our humanity, too. Without it, I feel we would have a lot more in common with chimps or dolphins.

A good metaphor, I think, is that the right brain is like feet and the left brain is like hands. You’re much more likely to be able to “get along” with just your feet, but it is the hand that has really made us human, with its tools and writing and art. We just can’t get too arrogant and forget, to stretch the metaphor, our connection to the earth.