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Temporal Lobe Seizures

Martial

Senior Member
Messages
1,409
Location
Ventura, CA
Anyone have ideas of what can help with this? I didn't really have it that bad before but as of late it keeps coming back, I have an underlying infection that is causing it so it won't fully go until I treat it. I just don't know if there are things I should take or try until that finally happens.

I talked to my doctor about it before, ran a brain MRI that showed hyper intensity in frontal cortex/white matter abnormality, also brain electrical testing showed that I had very poor electrical communication, though reflexes and cognition was strong.

I couldn't get a definitive test for it without doing an extended EEG study in a hospital because it is very hard to pick up on quick tests, based on my symptoms and findings though its suspected along with a weird frontal lobe dementia type presentation. Hopefully this is all reversible once I can clear everything out and continue to heal my brain and body.
 
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zzz

Senior Member
Messages
675
Location
Oregon
Antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) are the traditional drugs of choice for treating temporal lobe seizures. Dr. Goldstein used these drugs prominently in his treatments for ME/CFS, as he felt that this and similar illnesses were the result of hyperactivity of the central nervous system. His number one oral drug of choice for treating ME/CFS was the AED gabapentin. Lamictal (lamotragine) was also in his top tier of medications; Topamax (topiramate) is another AED that he liked, and that has a rather unique mechanism of action. So various AEDs may also have the benefit of alleviating your ME/CFS symptoms.
 

Martial

Senior Member
Messages
1,409
Location
Ventura, CA
Thanks for the responses guys! Well I used Gabapentin for anxiety before and could not tolerate it, this was many years ago but it caused me to have liver issues, actually anti seizure medications are pretty notorious for this.

At the time being my symptoms are not severe enough to need to be controlled by medication with the inherent risk attached, more so now then ever because a lyme infection is already hard enough on my liver.

feel treating the infection should clear this stuff up though and that medication may not be as effective in this case. I have been doing a low carb/high fat diet which has helped a lot though, also taurine seems to be god sent.
 
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*GG*

senior member
Messages
6,389
Location
Concord, NH
Anyone have ideas of what can help with this? I didn't really have it that bad before but as of late it keeps coming back, I have an underlying infection that is causing it so it won't fully go until I treat it. I just don't know if there are things I should take or try until that finally happens.

I talked to my doctor about it before, ran a brain MRI that showed hyper intensity in frontal cortex/white matter abnormality, also brain electrical testing showed that I had very poor electrical communication, though reflexes and cognition was strong.

I couldn't get a definitive test for it without doing an extended EEG study in a hospital because it is very hard to pick up on quick tests, based on my symptoms and findings though its suspected along with a weird frontal lobe dementia type presentation. Hopefully this is all reversible once I can clear everything out and continue to heal my brain and body.

Have nothing to add here, hope you don't mind, I broke up this paragraph. hard to read a large block of text for me and many. FYI

GG
 

Wayne

Senior Member
Messages
4,300
Location
Ashland, Oregon
Anyone have ideas of what can help with this?

Hey Todd,

I sometimes wake up from sleep with the sensation of my brain and nervous system twisting around in discombobulating swirls — writhing in un-rhythmic, un-harmonious gyrations — frenetic impulses jutting through my brain with no rhyme or rhythm to them. Whether correctly or not, I've attributed this to vertigo inducing seizure-like activity (seizures are not uncommon in Lyme situations).

What works for me? Coffee enemas. I can go from feel extraordinarily frazzled and discombobulated to calm and centered by doing a CE, while simultaneously doing various energy and polarity exercises, especially those that involve the head and brain area. The "Balancing the Cortices Technique", which only takes a minute or so, is one I would recommend as a good starting point. -- I hope you can find something that works well for you!

All the Best, Wayne

In case you're interested I started a thread once entitled, "Mind Gems - Energetic/Polarity Exercises I Find Almost Indispensable".

 
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wastwater

Senior Member
Messages
1,271
Location
uk
Maybe in my case i was thinking it maybe more like energy drop outs rather than seizures. Too little activity rather than too much
 

Hip

Senior Member
Messages
17,824
@Martial
Do you by chance ever experience Alice in Wonderland syndrome, which involves macropsia and/or micropsia (macropsia = the feeling that your body has expanded so that it feels larger than normal; micropsia = the feeling that your body has shrunk to minute proportions). Alice in Wonderland syndrome is most commonly caused by temporal lobe epilepsy/seizures (TLE).

Temporal lobe epilepsy has also been linked to producing spiritual mind states, such as ecstatic religious experiences.

Depersonalization and derealization can occur in people with TLE as well.

Herpes family virus infections of the brain have been linked to TLE.
 

Martial

Senior Member
Messages
1,409
Location
Ventura, CA
@Martial
Do you by chance ever experience Alice in Wonderland syndrome, which involves macropsia and/or micropsia (macropsia = the feeling that your body has expanded so that it feels larger than normal; micropsia = the feeling that your body has shrunk to minute proportions). Alice in Wonderland syndrome is most commonly caused by temporal lobe epilepsy/seizures (TLE).

Temporal lobe epilepsy has also been linked to producing spiritual mind states, such as ecstatic religious experiences.

Depersonalization and derealization can occur in people with TLE as well.

Herpes family virus infections of the brain have been linked to TLE.

Hey Hip yes, I get some symptoms of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome but not those symptoms specifically. Most often when it happens it feels like time is moving far too slow or fast, like some kind of dysfunction with my processing in the brain and external stimuli. I am looking to get a herpes panel done with the doctor, but already know that the lyme has been confirmed and definitely commonly causes the TLE. Thank god it has not turned into anything like full blown grand mal seizures yet though, that would be far more challenging and debilitating on top of everything else. Just trying to nip this in the bud along with everything else so I just don't get any severely worse before getting better. So far a lot of symptoms and stuff has left but some things like this still come and go with intensity. I also had major de personalization for a long time but through a trauma rather then illness, along with some powerful spiritual experiences again a bit different but still interesting. This TLE really is something unique in and of itself, impossible to compare to other things I have experienced but with the classical and typical symptoms it usually presents.
 

Hip

Senior Member
Messages
17,824
@Martial
Interesting about this feeling you get that time is moving too fast or too slow. Such feelings are reported to occur in alien abduction experiences, and there's a connection between temporal lobe epilepsy or temporal lobe instability and such experiences. See: Alien Abduction - the Inside Story. And déjà vu experiences are linked to TLE.

I constantly experienced Alice in Wonderland syndrome when I was a child, especially in my bedroom at night, just before going to sleep. I also used to have constantly recurring (and extremely frightening) hallucinations of gnomes nearly every night as a child, which went on for years. These gnomes were dark brown, and around 18 inches tall, and appeared in the dark spaces above the wardrobes in my bedroom. This I think was all likely down to having TLE, though this was before MRIs were available, so I never had an official diagnosis of TLE. I never told anyone about these experiences either, when I was a child, so my condition was not medically examined.
 
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Martial

Senior Member
Messages
1,409
Location
Ventura, CA
@Martial
Interesting about this feeling you get that time is moving too fast or too slow. Such feelings are reported to occur in alien abduction experiences, and there's a connection between temporal lobe epilepsy or temporal lobe instability and such experiences. See: Alien Abduction - the Inside Story. And déjà vu experiences are linked to TLE.

I constantly experienced Alice in Wonderland syndrome when I was a child, especially in my bedroom at night, just before going to sleep. I also used to have constantly recurring (and extremely frightening) hallucinations of gnomes nearly every night as a child, which went on for years. These gnomes were dark brown, and around 18 inches tall, and appeared in the dark spaces above the wardrobes in my bedroom. This I think was all likely down to having TLE, though this was before MRI were available, so I never had an official diagnosis of TLE.

Interesting thanks for sharing all of that Hip! So do you still get some symptoms like that if at all rarely? I had a lot of those other experiences but never accounted something like aliens lol. I did have the same recurring visions as a small child though that were very hard to describe. It was almost a sort of polarity between two worlds and two shapes of people, one very small and slender, and the other large and with high stature. It would collide together and form into some kind of explosion I have no idea how to describe that, lol. I wasn't hallucinating it or anything just like a strange thought pattern in my subconscious or something.


@adreno

Thank you for the tip, was already using some taurine for methylation, not sure how much I would have to take for a therapeutic dose with this but will investigate it.
 

zzz

Senior Member
Messages
675
Location
Oregon
Thank you for the tip, was already using some taurine for methylation, not sure how much I would have to take for a therapeutic dose with this but will investigate it.

Taurine is considered safe in doses up to 3000 mg per day. I use 1000 mg 3x per day, and find it quite helpful.
 

Hip

Senior Member
Messages
17,824
So do you still get some symptoms like that if at all rarely? I had a lot of those other experiences but never accounted something like aliens lol.

Unfortunately I don't experience these gnome hallucinations anymore, because I would love to analyze them as rational adult, rather than as a frightened child, as I was during the period that I used to regularly see them. I used to see them almost every night while I was in bed, just before going to sleep.

The most frightening thing about these gnomes was their deep black eyes that stared at you with a piercing intensity, giving a feeling that these gnomes were highly conscious entities, and their intense conscious awareness could be seen in their eyes. It was not as if these gnomes were just there doing their own thing in my bedroom; no, their entire interest and attention was focused on me. Very scary for a child. I used to half hide under the blankets of my bed at night in fear, looking at these gnomes, who were looking directly back at me.

There was a variable number of gnomes: at first, one would just appear on his own, standing on top of the wardrobe; but soon after another would appear standing right next to the first, and then a third would appear. But there were never ever more than three gnomes, for some reason. But all three would be focusing intense attention on me.

I think these gnomes or elves are probably a variation on the aliens seen during alien abduction experiences. I never had any such abduction experience, or anything like it, just gnomes. And these gnomes never did anything else but stand still on top of the wardrobe, staring intently at me with piercing black eyes.

Gnome hallucinations have a long history. Gnomes are part of the Irish folklore, and the folklore of Nordic countries.

In Iceland, belief in the existence of elves is so significant that recently a highway project was canceled because it was thought that the new road might disturb the elf environment!

And these gnomes can't just be regular hallucinations, because only gnome figures are seen. If you research into the gnome hallucinations seen in Iceland for example, it seems their visual form is consistent from person to person. If they were just regular hallucinations, you would expect each person to see entirely different visual forms and figures, concocted by their own particular imagination.

Likewise with alien abductions: from what I have read, the entities have the same visual form, consisting of large eyes and smooth faces. Kind of the diametric opposite of the gnomes, which have deeply furrowed faces like that of a very, very old man. It seems to me that these entities might be sort of facial archetypes or templates in the mind. That might explain the consistency of hallucination from person to person.

The most amazing thing was that much later on, I discovered in conversation that my father also saw exactly the same brown gnome when he was a child. We both discussed the visual details of these gnomes we saw, and both our experiences seemed to be identical. My father also saw the gnomes appear in exactly the same place as I did: they would appear standing in the shadowy area on top of a tall wardrobe in his childhood bedroom at night. And in his case, he saw these not in the UK like me, but in another country, where he was brought up. So I am presuming that the temporal lobe epilepsy or temporal lobe instability that likely underpins these gnome hallucinations is in part genetic, passed down to me from my father.


There is some interesting info about temporal lobe epilepsy symptoms here:

Temporal Lobe Epilepsy | Doctor | Patient.co.uk

In the above link it states that one possible symptom of a TLE seizure is seeing your own body from outside. That must be quite an amazing phenomenon to experience.

This seeing your own body from outside is very interesting in that such experiences are sometimes reported in near-death experiences, where a patient may have had a heart attack on the operating table, and during the 10 minutes or so that the medics are trying to get the patient's heart re-started, when the patient is technically dead, this patient may experience seeing his own body, and all the doctors frantically working around his body, from a perspective outside his body, typically from a top corner of the operating theatre room.

One study discovered that individuals who have had a near-death experience (NDE) were found to have temporal lobe epilepsy or altered temporal lobe functioning in their left cerebral hemisphere. Individuals who have had such NDEs thus appear to have a different brain physiology from the general population, due to their altered temporal lobe activity. So it may be that these near-death experience are in fact a symptom and manifestation of temporal lobe epilepsy.
 
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Marco

Grrrrrrr!
Messages
2,386
Location
Near Cognac, France
Interesting discussion (if a little odd :))

I'm not sure if its related but for several years after I first became Ill I had nighly attacks of sleep paralysis/hypnogogic hallucinations where I'd feel a presence in the room and then the weight of a body on top of me crushing me and a harsh guttural voice shouting obscenities in my ear. No visual hallucinations though.This would go on for several hours before fading around dawn.

These episodes are apparently what underlies the old incubus/succubus legends (not that there was anything smutty going on in my case you understand ;)).

But having the advantage of being an adult I eventually realised that, while distressing, these attacks were harmless and would pass and since then they disappeared and haven't returned thankfully.

I can't say I ever found them "a gateway into the borderlands of consciousness", more of a pain in the ass actually :

Some historical musings :

http://realitysandwich.com/46146/sleep_paralysis/