when playing sudoku triggers worrying symptoms

Doctors at Munich University Hospital welcomed a 25-year-old young man with more than surprising symptoms. When he plays sudoku, a popular mental puzzle, his left arm convulses uncontrollably. These movementsmovements jerks, which doctors call “clonic seizures,” also appear when the young man does other visuospatial tasks, such as sorting numbers in ascending order, but nothing when he reads a book, writes or solves a mathematical operation. Also, as soon as he stops his sudoku, his arm stops moving. What is going on in his brain?

Playing sudoku, a factor triggering epileptic seizures

To understand this enigmatic case, we must retrace the history of this patient, a sports student. A keen skier, he was caught in an avalanche a few months before going to Munich hospital. He had been stuck in the snow for about 15 minutes and as a result his brain was deprived of sufficient oxygen. Following this accident, he developed myoclonic convulsions of the mouth when speaking and of the legs when walking. But at this point, the arms were unaffected.

The patient therefore already suffers from after-effectsafter-effects neurological but how can we explain that sudoku triggers such symptoms? To find out, the doctors gave him a Functional MRIFunctional MRI while he solved a puzzle. The images show a surge in the central part of the right parietal lobe, an area of ​​the brain precisely involved in visuospatial tasks. This overactivation of the brain is responsible for the uncontrolled movements of the patient’s arm.

This form of epilepsy is called epilepsyepilepsy reflex which is characterized by the triggering of seizures following exposure to an external stimulus. The most common is photosensitive epilepsy, triggered by flashesflashes light, but other triggers exist such as noise, or even certain emotions.