The Canadian Globe and Mail reports on the remarkable case of Stacey Gayle, a 25-year-old woman from Edmonton who has just had neurosurgery to treat intractable epilepsy.
Gayle (right) was suffering from musicogenic epilepsy, a rare form of the condition in which seizures are triggered by music. In some patients with this type of epilepsy, listening to any type of music provokes a seizure. In others, seizures are only triggered by certain types of music.
The stimuli which induce seizures in musicogenic epileptics can be even more specific. In one case, the attacks occurred only when he played the piano, while another patient would have a seizure only when he heard "a brass wind instrument play a bass tone" (Daly & Barry, 1957).
Gayle suspected that her attacks were being triggered by a song called Temperature, by Sean Paul, as she remembers that this artist's music had been playing on at least two occasions that she had suffered from seizures. The doctors were initially sceptical about her claims, until they themselves induced seizures by playing that particular song.
Related:
Brain & Behavior
Medicine & Health
Comments (4)
Too bad it would likely have been unethical to play the song multiple times with her and see if there was a specific part of it that was creating the matter. That a single specific song could induce epilepsy is really amazing. If you've seen Serenity, there is a part where a hidden message is used to make one character (who has had her brain modified by the villains) go berserk and attack people after she is exposed to it. That seemed highly implausible at the time, but if triggers can be this specific for epilepsy maybe not. Now if only we knew how to implant this sort of trigger. Manchurian Candidate here we come.
Posted by: Joshua Zelinsky | January 20, 2008 4:10 PM