One 25-Year-Old Man Started Having Seizures After Playing Sudoku
Doctors were baffled, until they figured out the surprising reason why.
By Marlisse Cepeda Published: Oct 20, 2015
Sudoku can be one heck of a brain game, but for one German man, the challenging puzzle gave him seizures, baffling researchers at the University of Munich.
As profiled in a case study published in JAMA Neurology, the student was recovering after an avalanche buried him in the snow during a ski trip. The near-death experience left him without oxygen for 15 minutes, a condition called hypoxia.
As a result of his hypoxia, the patient developed involuntary muscle jerks in his mouth and legs, His arms, though, seemed to be functioning normally. That changed when the patient started playing sudoku puzzles while he was bored one day at a rehabiliation center. As he was playing, the right-handed man started experiencing seizures of his left arm. When he stopped playing, the seizures ceased. (Here's a video of the bizarre case.)
Dr. Berend Feddersen, neurologist and the study's co-author, had never seen such a response before, and nothing like it had ever been written about in the medical world. In the case study, researchers explained the reason for his sudoku seizures was "reflex epilepsy," seizures triggered by specific stimuli. In the man's case, he used three-dimensional imagination to solve the tricky puzzles.
"In order to solve a Sudoku, the patient used regions of his brain which are responsible for visual-spatial tasks. But exactly those brain parts had been damaged in the accident and then caused the seizures once they were used," said Dr. Feddersen.
Now, the patient has stopped playing the popular puzzle and has been seizure-free for over five years.
[via TIME
Marlisse Cepeda
Marlisse is the Web Editor of WomansDay.com, and she hails from Bronx, NY. She's currently obsessed with newsblogging, Instagramming just about everything, and, of course, Netflix (with wine).