What happens during a seizure and what usually causes them?
In: Biology
Seizures can happen for all kinds of reasons.
In the case of epileptic seizures, a seizure is basically a lightning storm going on in your brain due to synapses misfiring.
I have Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, in which case mine is caused by cells that didn’t form right when I was growing up which are in my temporal lobe (the left one).
I’m a doctor. For what it’s worth.
First the regular nerve system.
It’s made up of long cells in a row that stretch from your brain to the entire rest of your body. They transfer particles with rapid speed through their long bodies and these particles will excite other cells to do the same. Resulting in movement or thought or anything that discriminates your living body from a dead one.
These cells cannot do this 100% of the time because then you would contract every muscle 100% of the time and that would not be very useful. So when you decide to do something (consciously or uncousciously) you need enough particles to result in particles roaring through the nervecells. This heap of paricles you need, you could call a threshold. In epilepsy, these patients have a lower threshold since their cells are way more susceptible for stimulation and thus start sending particles even when your brain doesn’t want to. When that happens, you call it a seizure. You can conclude that this can happen any time! It happens even more often when an epileptic is triggered by sleepless nights, flashing lights, stress, basically anything that forces your brains out of their comfortzone.
I’m a disability support worker so I come across them quite a lot. All I can say is that they present differently from person to person with a huge variety of causes. I work a lot with a young man in a wheelchair and he will have both full body shaking seizures as well as vacant seizures in which he is completely still but isn’t quite ‘there’. You could yell next to his ear and he’d be pretty chill but if you cough or sneeze randomly it will always set him off. One day I put a coffee cup on a tile next to him and it made that weird reverberate noise which was enough to trigger him
Thiss stuff is taught in classes. However most of the things you learn are just practical. It’s eventually inside the clinic where you learn the rest.
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