#no exeptions

Trevor’s disease is given the highly scientific sounding name “Temporal Aphasia”.  It is quite obvious to the viewer that “temporal” refers to the time jumping done by the travelers, and aphasia is a word heard a lot in neuroscientific circles.

I’ve never before been bothered by pseudoscience in fiction, but that’s usually because the pseudoscience is referring to things I don’t have background in, hard sciences like physics and chemistry.

Unfortunately for me, I have enough hobbyist background in neurology to know “aphasia” in no way matches up with Trevor’s symptomatology.

Aphasia is a malfunction in the language center of the brain(often caused by stroke, lesions, or injury) that renders the sufferer either unable to produce(expressive) or comprehend(receptive) language. Sometimes both.

Aphasia varies in presentation and severity, but the point is that at no point in Travelers does Trevor find it difficult to use language.

So, what is Trevor’s problem? The simple explanation is that in season three Trevor starts to experience episodes of freezing. These become more severe as the season progresses, eventually interfering with his missions to such an extent that he has to give his team an explanation.

He is one of the oldest Travelers and has a pretty high (host)body count. This has caused a deterioration in his functioning that has only been seen in one other Traveler, Trevor’s now deceased wife.

The episodes of absence will slowly grow longer and longer, extending from a few seconds to a few minutes, eventuating in his being locked in for years. But can Trevor’s condition really be called a locked in syndrome? A locked in syndrome implies full consciousness in the sufferer with an uncooperative body, as seen in people with advanced ALS.

In Trevor’s case he isn’t watching the time go by, he’s not even registering it. He will stop in the middle of a sentence and come to hours later to finish it. It’s as if the time elapsed around him never existed.

This is more similar to an absence (or petit mal) seizure. In an absence seizure sufferers will typically lose a few seconds or minutes. The seizure can’t sustain itself much longer than that without serious side effects(death, mostly)

Trevor’s symptoms could also be diagnosed as a catatonia. They certainly fit the criteria with his immobility, waxy flexibility, mutism, and staring. But catatonia doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s also not a condition in and of itself. It is a symptom of a larger problem, whether psychological, neurological, or induced by drug use. Catatonia won’t do as an explanation.

With the outlandish symptoms displayed by Trevor it would be easy to brush this off as a fictitious condition made up for a television show with absolutely no basis in reality. And it is, but this is also where you would be wrong. The condition may be made up(and poorly named) but Trevor’s potential decades of awayness aren’t only a possibility, they were an epidemic.

In the 1920s Encephalitis Lethargica swept over Europe and America, leaving almost 1 million dead and millions more permanently disabled. A lucky few recovered fully and were able to resume their lives as before the illness, only for the damage done to become evident years or decades later.

One of the chief physicians of post-encephalitis lethargica described the symptomatology of the condition as a “phantasmagoria of maladies”. Indescribable in their multitudes.

Despite the seeming inconceivable variation to the symptoms of post-encephalitis, it did have one prevailing symptom. A withdrawal from the world. For some patients they would be completely aware of their surroundings, locked in and unable to interact without outside stimuli. For others they would become trapped in their minds, repeating numerical sequences or thought loops until their brains saw fit to release them for a few minutes of reprieve from this forced rumination.

One patient, described in Dr Oliver Sack’s book Awakenings(1973), was completely absent. The world around her and her own internal world ceased to exist. An absence seizure seen on a vast scale the mind shies away from comprehending.

Like the others, she could be awoken for moments, but never fully returned to herself without a medical intervention discovered 40 years after she contracted the disease.

As with anything, these temporal suspensions didn’t exist in isolation for Dr Sacks’ patients. They were accompanied by violent tics, parkinsonianism,  and physiological symptoms such as excessive perspiration and sebum production, to name a few.

The cause of these strange and numerous symptoms was as simple (as much as anything neurological can be). Lesions upon the brain.

As touched on previously, aphasia is also commonly caused by lesions. That said, the areas of the brain that control speech and the ones that control the perception of time and of self are completely different though, as with all things, not wholly divorced from each other.

What these cases serve to illustrate is that, from a Doyalist perspective, what the writers of Travelers are describing is possible. Science fiction hand waving could allow any lesions formed on Trevor’s hosts brain to be in the exact areas that would cause his described symptomology in complete isolation of any of the more undesirable symptoms.

Now what, in a Watsonian context, would cause this degeneration? I propose that the stress of multiple transfers and decades more of memory than humans are built for would cause a morphing of Trevor’s consciousness itself, making it harder and harder to flow comfortably through a hosts synapses without making some devastating adjustments, similar to the rouge A.I messenger program in s3e5 “Naomi”.

This could lead to lesions, especially in the deep brain, that could cause the very isolated and specific symptoms Trevor experiences.

A suggestion for the mechanism behind Trevor’s absences is that, due to this “Temporal Aphasia” being controlled somewhat by a deep brain stimulation device, the lesions on Trevor’s brain could be assumed to have been causing neurons to misfire, bringing us back to the absence seizure.

Unfortunately there’s no way to get an EEG or brain imaging to see what’s really happening inside Trevor’s head because he’s fictional. And so is his condition. That doesn’t mean I can stand for the misnomer of “Temporal Aphasia”.

As explained above, aphasia it the word that bothers me most in the name, but temporal has its issues, too. The existence of a temporal lobe complicates naming matters, and even if “temporal” were referencing the brain region instead of the adjective “relating to time” it would still be wrong.

I’ve come up with a couple of names for Trevor’s condition that I find more accurately describe it than “temporal aphasia”. Progressive Fatal Chronistic Catatonia or Degenerative Chronistic Catatonia. In both cases I’ve used “chronistic”(Greek) as opposed to “temporal”(Latin) to avoid any confusion with the Temporal Lobe.

As stated before, this essay is nothing more than a thought exercise on the nature of a fictional disease, written by a long term hobbyist with no qualifications.

If there are any glaring problems in this essay, please point them out! I’d love to have further discussions on this topic. Or suggest your own ideas for a better fitting name for Trevor’s condition, or the mechanisms behind it.