In Abeyance of a Grand Mal Seizure
By: Patrick Johnston
When he was fifteen years old, Atticus Johnson discovered that his brain was capable of making mistakes in ways he had not yet imagined. His mind had made lots of mistakes, both minor and more serious, up until that point, but it was when he was fifteen that Atticus Johnson became aware that his brain, as opposed to his mind, was capable of making mistakes.
The mistake that his brain made was to precipitate an avalanche of runaway excitatory activity known as an epileptic seizure. The type of epileptic seizure that Atticus Johnson experienced was, at the time, called a “grand mal seizure,” which in some senses was the worst kind of epileptic seizure, since it was the type that was most likely to result in death. A “grand mal” is what the neurologist who later saw Atticus Johnson as his patient called it. The words “grand” and “mal” were French words that respectively meant “big” and “bad.”
Atticus Johnson’s brain made the mistake of having a big bad seizure. If it were to happen today, it is more likely that a neurologist would refer to it as a “tonic-clonic” seizure. The words “tonic” and “clonic” were Greek words meaning “of stretching” and “violent confusion.” A more modern way of saying that Atticus Johnson had a big bad seizure was that he had a seizure that involved the violent and confused stretching of his muscles. Either way you say it, Atticus Johnson’s brain was certainly in error.
The circumstances were thus. Atticus Johnson was sitting in a chair watching a cartoon on the television whilst eating a bar of chocolate confectionery. The chair in which he was sitting was in the Junior Common Room of the boarding school that he had been sent to, and the cartoon on the television was a story entitled Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds, which was a playful anthropomorphic episodic tale in which a group of canines took on roles based upon characters from a classic novel by a French writer named Alexandre Dumas (père), which was entitled The Three Musketeers. Père meant “father,” or more specifically in this case “the father,” since Alexandre Dumas was also the name of another famous writer who was the son of the original Alexandre Dumas and was designated (fils), which meant “the son.”
At the precise moment in time that Atticus Johnson’s brain chose to malfunction in a big bad way, the closing credits of the cartoon were playing, which were accompanied by a song whose words went: “All for one and one for all, Muskehounds are always ready. All for one and one for all helping everybody.” These words, which echoed the motto of the eponymous musketeers from Dumas’ novel — “All for one, and one for all!” — were forever after burned into the very fabric of Atticus Johnson’s mind as a bizarre marriage of banality and terror.
He was never able to watch that particular cartoon again. If he ever caught a glimpse of it on a television or heard the dreadful ditty, he would immediately become sore afraid and would quickly exit the room.
In scientific terms, Atticus Johnson could be said to have developed a phobia of Muskehounds. The word phobia was of Greek origin and meant “morbid fear.” Atticus Johnson had developed a morbid fear of frivolous animated canines who were based upon characters from a book by Alexandre Dumas (père). In a sense, these canines were two steps removed from reality. Somebody had reimagined them from characters that had been imagined by Dumas. Atticus Johnson had a very real fear of something whose existence was largely imaginary.
He was later to learn quite a lot about how and why the brain developed phobias. It turned out that it was what might be considered as quite a useful adaptive response to life-threatening situations. Evolution had equipped mammals, of which humans were a fine example, with a way of learning very quickly that if they survived certain life-threatening situations, to try to never, never repeat the behaviours that had led to those life-threatening situations.
The mechanism that the mammalian brain had evolved in order to facilitate this was to ensure the proximity and massive interconnectivity of two brain regions that respectively dealt with the recording of episodes of events in memory, and with precipitating rapid emotional responses.
The area of the brain that was responsible for the recording of memories was called the hippocampus. This was a cognate Greek word consisting of two parts: “hippo,” meaning “horse,” and “campus,” which meant “of the sea” — hippocampus = “horse of the sea” = “seahorse.” The hippocampus was so named because the person who named it had noticed that a transverse section across its structure revealed a shape that resembled the side profile of a seahorse.
The area of the brain that dealt with precipitating rapid emotional responses was called the amygdala, which was a Latin word meaning “almond.” The amygdala was shaped like an almond.
When a life-threatening event occurred to a mammal, that mammal’s brain would see to it that its brain and body were very rapidly flooded with a cocktail of chemicals known as hormones and neurohormones and neurotransmitters, whose job was to try to facilitate the mammal’s possibility of surviving the life-threatening event. They would try to achieve this by generating a set of physiological conditions that made the animal better prepared for either fighting for its life or running away as rapidly as possible.
This involved things like increasing its heart rate and metabolic rate so as to rapidly provide energy to the muscles; diverting blood flow away from the digestive system, since there was no point in expending energy in digesting food unless you were going to be around to enjoy the benefits of having done so; promoting the rapid evacuation of the bowels so as to have less weight to carry in the event of a sprint from death. A useful shorthand for this was that the “fight or flight” response was triggered.
Simultaneously, the mind would be subjected to a massive dose of fear and rage, which it would later reinterpret as being one or the other, assuming it survived, depending on the exact way that the encounter played out.
Things that were sufficiently terrifying and life-threatening would be immediately seared into the wiring of the brain by the concerted actions of the hippocampus and the amygdala with such efficiency that anything that hinted at the apprehension of such events repeating themselves would immediately precipitate a dread fear.
This was all very well and good in engendering a visceral response that promoted such behaviours as avoiding places where one had previously survived an encounter with a ravening bear, since avoiding bears is a behaviour that might extend one’s lifespan. However, feeling a dread fear of animated canines engaged in imaginary quests in support of their king’s ambitions might be regarded as less adaptively useful.
All things considered, though, Atticus Johnson decided that he was glad that the part of his brain that generated phobias had decided to focus its attention on the Muskehounds rather than on the chocolate bar. Phobias were funny like that. They could sometimes get attached to a particular aspect of an event or situation and ignore others.
For some reason, Atticus Johnson’s brain had decided that the source of the dread fear that had accompanied its massive malfunction was the sights and sounds of the Muskehounds that assaulted its eyes and ears, rather than the chocolate bar in its mouth.
Atticus Johnson had a fondness for chocolate, and when he stopped imbibing alcohol, he found that he began to imbibe more chocolate. Apparently, this was a common occurrence amongst people who decide to stop imbibing alcohol, particularly if they were people who used to use a lot of alcohol before deciding to stop doing so. It seemed that their brains had decided to look for an alternative source of sugar.