Some 2,500 years ago Hippocrates wrote the first text on epilepsy, the ‘Sacred Disease.’ The ancients called it so believing that sufferers were blessed with divine messages and visions. Hippocrates description is now known as temporal lobe epilepsy.
Symptoms include specific visual and auditory hallucinations and frequently religious hallucinations, the sense of ‘something greater in the universe,’ and strong religious feelings. Researchers find evidence of ‘epilepsy like’ phenomena in descriptions of some charismatic religious figures, including Joan of Arc, St. Paul, and Muhammad. Ellen White, the founder of the Seventh Day Adventists and a religious visionary, clearly suffered symptoms of epilepsy. Likewise, historical descriptions of Joseph Smith (Mormon visionary) suggest he suffered from it as well. The director of the epilepsy center at New York University suspects when Moses saw the burning bush, it might have been God — but more likely a temporal lobe seizure.
So, assuming the process of natural selection is always extant, why for the continuing proliferation of seizure disorders, mystic events, hallucinations, bad beer (budweiser). For those of you with small pineal glands, "extant" is from the Latin, meaning "if it smells like a fish...etc."
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