EEG AND CORTICAL ELECTROGRAMS IN PATIENTS WITH TEMPORAL LOBE SEIZURES

Abstract

HUGHLINGS Jackson,¹in 1888, described a "peculiar variety of epilepsy" characterized by "exceedingly complex and very purposive seeming actions during continuing unconsciousness." Preceding these states of automatic behavior the patients were noted to have intellectual auras, or "dreamy states," with psychical hallucinations or illusions. Olfactory, gustatory or visceral auras were common. He noted that movements of mastication and salivation occurred frequently during the attack. Ten years later (1894) Jackson demonstrated by autopsy studies that such seizures were related to epileptogenic lesions in the temporal lobe, involving the uncinate gyrus and the adjacent "temporo-sphenoidal gyrus." In some cases the lesions extended into the tip of the temporal lobe and the frontal and temporal operculums. A specific form of electroencephalogram characterized by rhythmic sharp waves and 6 per second waves was first described by Gibbs, Gibbs and Lennox²in 1938 as the typical electrographic manifestation of psychomotor seizures. It was