Psychic Seizures as Focal Manifestations in Post-Traumatic Brain Disease *

Although Hughlings Jackson's name has become associated in our minds with focal motor seizures, Jackson himself did not limit his views to the motor manifestations alone as an example of localized special functions of the different parts of the brain. Indeed, to him, it was just as logical to expect sensory as well as motor discharges, and mental as well as physical ones. It is, nevertheless, quite rare to encounter a patient manifesting seizures sudden in onset, stereotyped in content, and abrupt in termination, thus resembling motor or sensory attacks but differing only in that the content of the seizure is purely intellectual. Recently the writer reported2 two patients with brain tumor who manifested intellectual seizures which, however, had associated motor phenomena. At the same time Bricknere described a case in which a patient with arteriosclerotic cerebral changes suffered from attacks of compulsive mental discharges which he was able to describe as things apart from his own personality and which were dearly in the nature of intellectual seizures. The following is a strikingly similar dinical picture in the case of a young man following cerebral injury.