miniaturized electronics box strapped to their belts, some of Robert Heath’s schizophrenic patients spent hours pressing their switches with beatifically expectant smiles. It was after several months of cat experiments that Professor Heath suggested that we spend some time interviewing a hospitalized, chronically ill female patient, Donna, before and during the time she was being studied with recording and stimulating depth electrodes in the human neurophysiology laboratory. Donna, bony thin in a lose fitting green hospital gown and sandals, had dark red toenails, blonde hair and eyes shadowed darkly. In her mid-thirties, she had never married and, when she could, worked as a beautician. She told us that since her menarche at 13, she increasingly often had episodes of spontaneous ecstatic rushes along with sudden visions of strong white light. She attributed these experiences to visitations of “...an unseen Christ.” She showed me a stack of notebooks filled with hand written accounts of her religious experiences interspersed with biblical quotations and difficult to follow discussions of what she called the Christian ideals underlying the Civil War. She read parts of it to us. One of her memorable stories was about being invited to a Children’s Crusade that had begun in Georgia, led by a great grandson of Stonewall Jackson. “We were trying to find the Lord to see if He would part the waters and open up an escape route from General Sherman’s march to the sea.” From a relatively poor family of Southern Baptists in rural Louisiana, she had lived in a state psychiatric hospital for almost three years. Her diagnoses ranged from borderline schizophrenia to temporal lobe epilepsy. The collateral interviews with her mother from several years before had been placed in the hospital chart. They recounted that in the patient’s middle to late teens she had become suddenly promiscuous, frequently approaching strange men in city parks. Obsessed with fellatio and swallowing sperm