How Sudoku Caused This Man’s Seizures

After analyzing his brain imaging data, the patient’s doctors concluded that the oxygen deprivation caused damage throughout the brain, and that Sudoku puzzles activated a highly excitable region, resulting in seizures. The discovery is interesting in that a lack of oxygen in a natural disaster was the apparent cause of seizures that occurred only when the man involved worked on Sudoku puzzles. Sudoku puzzles are 9-by-9 grids with numbers in a few of the squares; to solve them, a person must fill in the other squares with the right pattern of numbers. Several weeks later, the tremors came on when he tried to solve a sudoku puzzle, researchers report today in JAMA Neuroscience.

The JAMA Neurology feature “Images in Neurology” features the case of a 25-year-old right-handed physical education student who was buried by an avalanche during a ski tour and endured 15 minutes of hypoxia (oxygen deficiency). The man was lucky-after rescue workers resuscitated him, he recovered with minimal brain injury.

He subsequently developed myoclonus, or involuntary jerking.

Every time he tried to solve one of the puzzles, he developed what doctors call “clonic seizures”, which caused rapid contractions of the muscles of his left arm.

The unique case is an example of reflex epilepsy, characterised by seizures that are induced by external stimuli. The authors note that, in most cases, these sorts of seizures involve activation of the brain’s parietal lobe, which controls how we rearrange numbers and manipulate objects in space (so, Sudoku-especially when it’s imagined as a three dimensional game). Despite this damage, the solution was simple: The man stopped tackling sudoku puzzles, and has been seizure-free for 5 years.

Fortunately, our story has a happy ending. But that didn’t stop his doctors from taking a few pretty odd video of the phenomenon.