1/
🤔I kept thinking about Klüver-Busy after @RyanBPetersonMD fantastic case (Post-herpes encephalitis NMDA, check it out!)
🧐How in the world did they get to describe this syndrome!? Well, it's fascinating.
2/ 🤓A Cactus (mescaline), a monkey named "Aurora", Heinrich Klüver and a neurosurgeon (Bucy)
✅Klüver: experimental psychologist, helped shape the field (neuroscience). He had an interest in Peyote and mescaline induced hallucinations (eidetic visual phenomena)
3/ 🌵Mescaline (Trimethoxyphenethylamine)
✅Occurs naturally in two cacti: San Pedro and Peyote
🌵Alkaloid, hallucinogen, chemically related to amphetamine
🌵Stimulates serotonin and dopamine receptors (locus coeruleus and prefrontal cortex
Peyote is a cute cactus.😍😍
4/ Back to Aurora 🐒
✅She was an angry monkey
🙈Klüver gave mescaline to Aurora. He noted chewing and licking movements on her.
🙉He thought these were "uncinate" fits (Hughlings Jackson term for oral automatisms, taste/smell hallucinations in temporal lobe epilepsy)
5/ 🥸Klüver thought the temporal lobe was the area where the hallucinogenic effect of mescaline resided.
🤠He needed a Neurosurgeon friend to remove the temporal lobe and confirm mescaline's site of action (Paul Bucy)
6/ 🤠Bucy removed a large portion of the left temporal lobe of our aggressive friend Aurora.
🐒Aurora became tame! A lovely well behaved monkey.
😳Klüver and Bucy decided to remove the right temporal lobe as well.
🥺The mescaline-induced oral automatisms continued.
7/
This discovery turned Klüver research from Peyote visions to the study of the temporal lobe and its diseases
8/ "it may come as a surprise that the discovery of the syndrome of bilateral destruction of the temporal lobes came by chance and without prior planning. This discovery was the result of the action of a well-prepared, active, alert mind" Klüver
1/🧵
"A novelist conversation with the abyss"
Charles Ferdinand Ramuz🥸
French-speaking Swiss (Laussane) writer 1878-1947 | Most prominent Swiss novelist
😞R MCA stroke @ age 65
🥸He called it "The adventure."
🧐Risks: smoker
2/ 😍Igor Stravinsky (one of the most influential composers of the 20th century) + Ramuz -> created the famous musical play L' Historie du Soldat (1918):
"You have no right to share what you are and what you were."⤵️
E-N-J-O-Y
3/ 🥸R handed. Developed L-sided weakness and crossed Aphasia!
"Crossed aphasia is a phenomenon in which an individual sustains a lesion in the right hemisphere (typically non-language dominant), but who exhibits an aphasic syndrome." pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28114692/
🧵 1/ Salvador Dalí's delirium as science
1904-1989 | Spanish surrealist | Explorer of the (erotic) subconscious through his "paranoiac-critical" method
🦋🦋🦋 Neurology is everywhere
2/"Critical paranoia."
🤓Another way to perceive reality. Revealing the "irrational knowledge."
🤓"My whole ambition in the pictorial domain is to materialize the images of my concrete irrationality with the most imperialist fury of precision" Dalí
3/ 🤔"..it makes the world of delirium pass onto the plane of reality." Dalí