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Petit ma1 is a condition that can cause severe disability in young people more than half of whom subsequently convert to grand ma1 (Lennox,11,12). This serious prognosis is often not acknowledged. Clinical accounts of petit ma1 vary as do the waveforms of the electroencephalographic spike-and-wave activity associated with this condition. In this and related fields it is not yet clear what the relationship is between the clinical and electro-physiological events (Jasper, 9; Jasper and Droogleever Fortuyn, 10; Goldie and Green, 2-6).In this paper a phenomenon is reported which has been observed during intensive electrical and psychological studies of petit mal. Besides the petit ma1 attack that was associated with spike-and-wave activity on the electroencephalogram, an episodic change in mental state lasting 2-3 minutes was observed that was not accompanied by such an electrical disturbance. Such episodes interrupted mental activity, disrupted social and scholastic activities more than the attacks accompanied by spike-andwave activity, and were not observed in the normal controls and patients with other types of epilepsy including temporal lobe epilepsy that were also examined under