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I'm reading more of Sack's commentary on migraine--this time in a blog at the NYTimes, in which he explores the phenomena of migraine aura, or the visual disturbance that often precedes a migraine headache.  Both his own experience with aura, and his research of the phenomena, have revealed a fascinatingly uniform and transcendent geometrical patterns.  He writes:

 "Such gemetrical form constants are not dependent on memory or personal experience or desire or imagination...these hallucinations reflect the minute anatomical organziation, the cytoarchitecture, of the primary visual cortex, including its columanr structure--and the ways in which the activity of millions of nerve cells organizes itself to produce comples and ever-changing patterns.  We can actually see, through such hallucinations, something of the dynamics of a large populations of living nerve cells and, in particular, the rolse of what mathematicians term deterministic chaos in allowing complex patterns of activity to emerge through the visual cortex.  This activity operats at a basic cellular level, far beneath the level of personal experience.  They are archetypes, in a way, universals of human experience...  

Migraine-like patterns, so to speak, are seen not only in Islamic art, but in classical and medieval motifs, in Zapotec architecture, in the bark paintings of Aboriginal artists in Australia, in Acoma pottery, in Swazi basketry--in virtually every culture.  THere seems to have been, throughout human history, a need to externalize, to make art from, these internal experiences, from the decorative motifs of prehistoric cave paintings to the psychedelic art of the 1960s.  Do the arabesques in our own minds, built into our own brain organization, provude us with our first intimations of geometry, of formal beauty? 

Sacks seems to describe a phenomena of the cognitive unconscious, or tacit knowledge, breaking though, almost taking over or hijacking the conscious, or the storyteller.  Does this happen in other mental illness--the conscious or storyteller losing its "supremacy" over the conscious?  

Check out the migraine-art slide show here.