A 48 YEAR OLD FEMALE PSYCHIATRIC CASE
The first step in solving the mystery of Sarah’s behaviour involved delving into her past. An interest in religion was nothing new for her; she had shown spells of fundamentalist religious interest since the age of 13. This would periodically return but it was never long-lasting.
It was first presumed Sarah had schizophrenia because of her auditory hallucinations, but she did not fit the classical symptoms.
When a brain scan revealed a tumour, psychiatrist Sebastian Walther realised her brain network has been ‘disturbed’ in a very critical spot, affecting the way she experiences sounds. Walther estimates the tumour could have been there since adolescence, which was also when her religious interest began.
Once Walther studied her medical history and symptoms, he noted she had had only four ‘periods of symptoms’ and they were always the same: she would hear divine voices, feel extremely religious, and bond to religious groups. But this interest would disappear as soon as it came on, and she would feel nothing similar for years until the cycle started once more.
A person who experiences strong religious tendencies will be using the same brain to assess the pros and cons of the matter, as had permitted and perhaps eagerly embraced the particular sect of the particular religion in the first place.
I suggest the antithesis of this would be the case of a person possessed of a calculating, logical, ‘non-religious’ brain – where the constant barrage of religious notions and arguments to which it is subjected, find no sympathetic acceptance, because the brain is inherently antipathetical to blind belief unendorsed by fact or reason, and to wilful, self-serving, wild contortions of logic.
Don Barzini 