Epileptic cult leaders?

Speaker: Yuval Laor, PhD

ICSA CONFERENCE 2026

Date: July 1-4, 2026

Hilton Bayfront, San Diego 

Session summary:

In this presentation, Yuval Laor proposes that some cult leaders may exhibit a combination of dark triad personality traits and features associated with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), which can contribute to their charismatic and controlling behavior.

Full Abstract

I propose that a subset of cult leaders may exhibit a combination of dark triad personality traits and psychological features associated with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), a non-convulsive form of epilepsy that can produce behavioral and experiential characteristics commonly observed in cult leaders.

Traits common to both contexts include a strong sense of personal destiny, hypermoralism (black-and-white thinking), paranoia, religiosity, philosophic interest, emotionality, anger, aggression, stickiness, obsessionalism, humorlessness, and a tendency for repetition. People with TLE often report frequent awe experiences, and prolonged states of fervor. They may appear unusually intense and driven, speak for many hours at a time, and experience subjective states of “felt understanding” and “felt importance.” Notably, olfactory hallucinations—a well-documented feature of TLE—have been described in historical accounts of several well-known cult leaders.

Together, these experiences may generate a compelling interpersonal effect, in which others feel profoundly known or understood. The accompanying sense of importance makes them feel that they have an exceptionally important message to the world. This can manifest as hypergraphia or compulsive self-documentation. This might explain why, ever since the advent of video recorders, many cult leaders obsessively film themselves – at times even creating incriminating evidence in the process.

In recent years, I have explored my hypothesis through preliminary qualitative observations of former members of small, little-known cults. When presented with a list of TLE-associated traits, all participants independently reported strong overlap with their cult leader’s behavior. If my assertion is correct, cult-awareness education could benefit by including discussion of TLE.

Yuval Laor is an independent researcher located in Boulder Colorado. Yuval has a PhD in culture studies, and has been a regular speaker in ICSA conferences. He is currently finishing a book titled Fervor: What cults teach us about religion and dangers of awe.

https://internationalculticstudies.org/icsa-conference-2026/agenda/