Did you know the famous Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky of the 18th century decadent Russia was a patient of epilepsy himself and his second most famous novel The Idiot depicts the effects and incidence of apparent temporal lobe seizures. Yes, temporal lobe seizure or temporal lobe epilepsy is another variant of or sub type of epilepsy.
Temporal lobe epilepsy falls under the category of focal epilepsy. A person suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy will experience frequent seizures and the condition is a chronic neurological one. 50% of all the epilepsy cases that are reported are focal epilepsy cases.
Symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy
Temporal lobe epilepsy symptoms can be widely varying in nature but certain common patterns can be detected among those varying features. The experience during temporal lobe epilepsy involves synaesthesia where completely foreign or familiar experiences, thoughts, emotions and feelings of different types get mixed.
A patient might even experience a sense of déjà vu or a resurfacing of a chain of old memories. Some other patients will find that everything surrounding them appears to be unfamiliar or strange including family members, their homes or houses, their neighborhood etc.
These people also tend to hallucinate a lot, suffer from illusions, and may sense certain strange tastes or smells or hear music and voices, see people who are not there and other such strange things. Warnings or auras are the names given to these hallucinations. From a few seconds, these auras may last for 2 minutes or one minute.
Those who suffer from temporal lobe epilepsy seizures often experience symptoms which differ in quality and intensity. At times seizures are really mild making them extremely difficult to detect or notice. Whereas in severe cases of temporal lobe epilepsy, symptoms can range from pleasure to intellectual fascination and fright.
Even an adult who loves to wax eloquent and is an artful speaker will find it difficult at times to describe in words the strange sensations and experiences that these seizures result in. Naturally, we have a rather vague idea of how children feel and what they experience during temporal lobe epilepsy seizures.