O języku, mózgu, ekstatycznych stanach religijnych i twórczości artystycznej
Language, brain, states of religious ecstasy, and artistic creativity

Summary/Abstract: The article consists of two parts. In the first part I present an overview of the history of research on aphasia, taking into account the fundamentally interdisciplinary character of this research; a distinct illustration of this is the inspiration that the anthropologist Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) drew from the work of the neurologist Henry Head (1861-1940). Another example is the modern use of narratological tools in analyses of aphasic narrative discourse impairments. In the second part I describe Gastaut-Geschwind syndrome and follow this description with a comparison of three utterances, differing in genre but similar in subjectmatter: an utterance by a person suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy, Prince Myshkin’s monologue from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 'The Idiot', and Pascal's 'Mémorial'. This allows me to present several different positions on the hypothetical neurological bases of religious belief.

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