Seizure aesthetics: Temporal regimes and medical technology in epilepsy diagnosis

Abstract

Epilepsy is a neurological condition defined by time; it is characterized by a lifelong tendency for recurrent, unpredictable, and unprovoked seizures, during which people lose control over parts of body-mind function. Diagnosing seizures involves using electroencephalograms to represent and classify brain waves in relation to clock time. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in a North American teaching hospital, this paper shows that as neurologists learn to diagnose seizures, they internalize clock time norms for normal and abnormal brain waves. The paper demonstrates how these temporal norms work to assign a set of aesthetics to brain waves: patterns that conform to clock-time norms are beautiful, whereas hard-to-classify patterns are ugly. These aesthetic judgments follow diagnostically complex patients in future hospital visits, who become known, for instance, as “the patient with the ugly EEG.” The paper critiques this ascription of labels to patients and situates the role of the electroencephalogram's clock time in this predicament. It concludes with a speculative design project that reorients the relationship between temporality and embodiment by using the heartbeat as a situated and co-produced alternative to the standardized and invariant clock. Ultimately, the paper argues that the aesthetics of medical technology are fundamental to clinical care, thereby opening up new directions for research at the intersection of critical time studies and disability studies.