hey, brainman, want to weigh in?
woman cured of seizures caused by reggae
yeah, so this woman really likes sean paul (pre-wikipedia'ed for your convenience...you're welcome, dani :-P), but when she started having mad seizures whenever she listened to his songs, she started getting suspicious. I don't know if it's more ridiculous that she thought her seizures were caused by this one particular singer or that it actually turned out to be true.
I guess this just goes to show that one day, if you're not careful, the rhythm *is* eventually gonna get you. be careful, kids.
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Well, there are different types of epilepsy, but basically what happens is that an excess in brain activity in one part of the brain (usually the same area for a given person) reaches a certain point and "kindles" excessive activity all over the brain, which goes on for a while and then gradually dies down again. This activity is not only excessive but highly rhythmic and synchronized compared to normal brain activity (Google Image Search "seizure EEG" to see some examples).
A common kind of epilepsy is temporal lobe epilepsy, and one of the things processed in the temporal lobes is... music (and all sorts of sound, really). So it is possible that if this woman had lateral temporal lobe epilepsy (meaning the temporal lobes were the initiation site for the seizures), then listening to Sean Paul's music made her neurons "Get Busy" at a rhythm similar to that of seizure activity, and once those rhythms had been initiated the activity snowballed out of control and caused a full-blown seizure.
In theory, then, it would also seem that any other music with rhythms/timbres similar to Sean Paul's music would also cause seizures. Although if he is really her favorite artist, she is probably attending more closely to music of his than to other music, and attention is known to increase the amplitude of neural activity.
The More You Know...
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