Neuroscience

How the brain wakes us from daydreams

When we daydream, we must be able to snap back to attention at a moment's notice. Researchers at Boston Children's Hospital uncovered how our brains can do things like react to a question when we're daydreaming: firing activity ...

Epilepsy (from the Ancient Greek ἐπιληψία (epilēpsía) — "seizure") is a common and diverse set of chronic neurological disorders characterized by seizures. Some definitions of epilepsy require that seizures be recurrent and unprovoked, but others require only a single seizure combined with brain alterations which increase the chance of future seizures.

Epileptic seizures result from abnormal, excessive or hypersynchronous neuronal activity in the brain. About 50 million people worldwide have epilepsy, and nearly 90% of epilepsy occurs in developing countries. Epilepsy becomes more common as people age. Onset of new cases occur most frequently in infants and the elderly. As a consequence of brain surgery, epileptic seizures may occur in recovering patients.

Epilepsy is usually controlled, but not cured, with medication. However, over 30% of people with epilepsy do not have seizure control even with the best available medications. Surgery may be considered in difficult cases. Not all epilepsy syndromes are lifelong – some forms are confined to particular stages of childhood. Epilepsy should not be understood as a single disorder, but rather as syndromic with vastly divergent symptoms, all involving episodic abnormal electrical activity in the brain and numerous seizures.

This text uses material from Wikipedia licensed under CC BY-SA