Tiny epileptic seizures are way more common than you might think

The current thinking on epilepsy is that seizures, like many other brain phenomena, occur across a wide continuum of scales. Seizures so tiny as to be barely noticeable are commonplace, while full-body grand mal seizures are rare. The analogy here is to storms in the weather, from the tiny whirls and vortices swirling around my fingertips as I type up to Katrina. A turbulent internal climate brought on by stress or illness has bigger and more violent storms.

There is a variety of seizure known as an absence seizure where the sufferer blanks out, gets "stuck" staring into space for a short interval. The state is more like sleepwalking than the violent twitching people imagine when they think of epilepsy. The neurobio community is starting to believe that smaller versions of absence seizures underlie some anxiety symptoms. A frequently cited "case study" is George Costanza. The idea is that George's anxiety systems are miswired so they have hair-trigger sensitivity. Anytime he suffers the slightest adversity, he exhibits the kind of locked-up cyclic behavior frequently associated with seizures. George's entire attention is consumed as storms of anxiety rage across his cortex. During these periods he lies compulsively, flies into rages, fixates obsessively and has paranoid delusions. Most of the time, he's fine, and can be quite affable, but for short intervals, electrical storms race across his internal sky, leaving strewn wreckage in their wake.

One strong piece of evidence for the theory that epileptic episodes are ubiquitous and scale-invariant is the fact that a variety of anxiety symptoms can be alleviated by low dosages of a class of epilepsy medication. The idea is that a panic episode of the kind routinely experienced by George is one-tenth of a grand-mal seizure, so one-tenth of the grand-mal dosage of epilepsy meds should help alleviate them. My own experience has borne this out in spades. Mental illness, like most other illness, is not an all-or-nothing category.

© ethan hein 2007 | back to memebase | back to top