i don’t know anything about brains or brain chemistry
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The brain is made up of many long and branching cells, which “fire” to communicate with each other, with an electrical signal traveling until it triggers a chemical message between cells. The normal firing that lets us think and act and understand what we’re seeing and hearing is chaotic and doesn’t have a strong overall pattern. Looking at the brain’s electrical activity is normally like watching a thousand people who are each listening to a different song through headphones, all dancing at once–it looks meaningless and disorganized. This is good, because it means the brain is functioning normally and lots of different complicated things are quietly happening at once.
In a seizure, for one reason or another, large clumps of cells start firing together in a synced-up pattern instead of their normal pattern. Imagine all those people suddenly got switched to the same song and are dancing in sync. Now, when we look at the brain’s electrical activity, we see big spiky repeating patterns. This is bad news, because the brain isn’t firing in ways that make sense or that let it work normally.
Whenever you look at something, it triggers at least some nerve cells to fire to say “hey, I see that” and to pass the news along to other cells that help process and identify it. It seems that certain fast and repeating visual things, like a strobe light, can trigger seizures in a small percent of people who have seizures. Something about the fast repeating pattern seems to activate cells in part of the brain responsible for processing vision, in a way that then sets off a spreading wave of cells firing together.
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