What seems to be happening—and it is important that it was only the olfactory tracts, not the cortex, which were damaged—is the development of a greatly enhanced olfactory imagery, almost, one might say, a controlled hallucinosis, so that in drinking his coffee, or lighting his pipe—situations normally and previously fraught with associations of smell—he is now able to evoke or re-evoke these, unconsciously, and with such intensity as to think, at first, that they are ‘real’.
This power—part conscious, part unconscious—has intensified and spread. Now, for example, he snuffs and ‘smells’ the spring. At least he calls up a smell-memory, or smell-picture, so intense that he can almost deceive himself, and deceive others, into believing that he truly smells it.
We know that such a compensation often occurs with the blind and the deaf. We think of the deaf Beethoven and the blinded Prescott. But I have no idea whether it is common with anosmia.
19. Murder
Donald killed his girl while under the influence of PCP. He had, or seemed to have, no memory of the deed—and neither hypnosis nor sodium amytal served to release any. There was, therefore, it was concluded when he stood trial, not a repression of memory, but an organic amnesia—the sort of blackout well described with PCP.
The details, manifest on forensic examination, were macabre, and could not be revealed in open court. They were discussed in camera—concealed from both the public and from Donald himself. Comparison was made with the acts of violence occasionally committed during temporal lobe or psychomotor seizures. There is no memory of such acts, and perhaps no intention of violence— those who commit them are considered neither responsible nor culpable, but are none the less committed for their own and others’ safety. This was what happened with the unfortunate Donald.
He spent four years in a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane—despite doubts as to whether he was either criminal or insane. He seemed to accept his incarceration with a certain relief—the sense of punishment was perhaps welcome, and there was, he doubtless felt, security in isolation. ‘I am not fit for society’, he would say, mournfully, when questioned. « Security from sudden, dangerous uncontrol—security, and a sort of serenity too. He had always been interested in plants, and this interest, so constructive, and so remote from the danger zone of human relation and action, was strongly encouraged in the prison-hospital where he now lived. He took over its ragged, un-tended grounds, and created flower gradens, kitchen gardens, gardens of all sorts. He seemed to have achieved a sort of austere equilibrium, in which human relations, human passions, previously so tempestuous, were replaced by a strange calm. Some considered him schizoid, some sane: everyone felt he had achieved a sort of stability. In his fifth year he started to go out on parole, being allowed to leave the hospital on weekend passes. He had been an avid cyclist, and now he again bought a bike. And it was this which precipitated the second act of his strange history.
He was pedalling, fast, as he liked to, down a steep hill when an oncoming car, badly driven, suddenly loomed on a blind turn. Swerving to avoid a head-on collision, he lost control, and was flung violently, head-first, onto the road.
He sustained a severe head injury—massive bilateral subdural hematomas, which were at once surgically evacuated and drained— and severe contusion of both frontal lobes. He lay in a coma, hemiplegic, for almost two weeks, and then, unexpectedly, he started to recover. And now, at this point, the ‘nightmares’ began.
The returning, the re-dawning, of consciousness was not sweet— it was beset by a hideous agitation and turmoil, in which the half-conscious Donald seemed to be violently struggling, and kept crying, ‘Oh God!’ and ‘No!’ As consciousness grew clearer, so memory, full memory, a now terrible memory, came with it. There were severe neurological problems—left-sided weakness and numbness, seizures, and severe frontal-lobe deficits—and with these, with the last of these, something totally new. The murder, the deed, lost to memory before, now stood before him in vivid, almost hallucinatory detail. Uncontrollable reminiscence welled up and overwhelmed him—he kept ‘seeing’ the murder, enacting it, again and again. Was this nightmare, was this madness, or was there now ‘hyper-mnesis’—a breakthrough of genuine, veridical, terrifyingly heightened memories?
He was questioned in great detail, with the greatest care to avoid any hints or suggestions—and it was very soon clear that what he now showed was a genuine, if uncontrollable, ‘reminiscence’. He now knew the minutest details of the murder: all the details revealed by forensic examination, but never revealed in open court—or to him.
All that had been, or seemed, previously lost or forgotten— even in the face of hypnosis or amytal injection—was now recovered and recoverable. More, it was uncontrollable; and still more, completely unbearable. He twice attempted suicide on the neuro-surgical unit and had to be heavily tranquilised and forcibly restrained.
What had happened to Donald—what was happening with him? That this was a sudden irruption of psychotic phantasy was ruled out by the veridical quality of the reminiscence shown—and even if it were entirely psychotic phantasy, why should it occur now, quite suddenly, unprecedentedly, with his head injury? There was a psychotic, or near psychotic, charge to the memories—they were, in psychiatric parlance, intensely or over-‘cathected’—so much so as to drive Donald to incessant thoughts of suicide. But what would be a normal cathexis for such a memory—the sudden emergence, from total amnesia, not of some obscure Oedipal struggle or guilt, but of an actual murder?
Was it possible that with the loss of frontal-lobe integrity an essential prerequisite for repression had been lost—and that what we now saw was a sudden, explosive and specific ‘de-repression’? None of us had ever heard or read of anything quite like this before, although all of us were very familiar with the general dis-inhibition seen in frontal-lobe syndromes—the impulsiveness, the facetiousness, the loquacity, the salacity, the exhibition of an uninhibited, nonchalant, vulgar Id. But this was not the character which Donald now showed. He was not impulsive, unselective, inappropriate, in the least. His character, judgment and general personality were wholly preserved—it was specifically and solely memories and feelings of the murder which now erupted uncontrollably, obsessing and tormenting him.
Was there a specific excitatory or epileptic element involved? Here EEG studies were especially interesting, because it was evident, using special (nasopharyngeal) electrodes, that in addition to the occasional grand mal seizures he had there was an incessant seething, a deep epilepsy, in both temporal lobes, extending down (one might surmise, but it would need implanted electrodes to confirm) into the uncus, the amygdala, the limbic structures—the emotional circuitry which lies deep to the temporal lobes. Penfield and Perot (Brain, 1963, pp. 596-697) had reported recurrent ‘reminiscence’, or ‘experiential hallucinations’, in some patients with temporal-lobe seizures. But most of the experiences or reminiscences which Penfield described were of a somewhat passive sort— hearing music, seeing scenes, being present perhaps, but present as a spectator, not as an actor.[18] None of us had heard of such a patient re-experiencing, or rather re-enacting, a deed—but this apparently was what was happening with Donald. No clear decision was ever reached.
18
And yet this was not invariably so. In one particularly horrifying, traumatic case, recorded by Penfield, the patient, a girl of twelve, seemed to herself, in every seizure, to be running frantically from a murderous man who was pursuing her with a writhing bag of snakes. This ‘experiential hallucination’ was a precise replay of an actual horrid incident, which had occurred five years before.