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A Case Study of Reflex Epilepsy Induced by Playing Chess

An electrical storm in the brain reveals links between chess and (some) other forms of complex thought.

While the surreal injuries and rare diseases are often the things that capture my students' interest immediately, we ultimately spend a lot more time talking about much more common causes of functional disruption in the brain: Stroke, blunt-force trauma to the head, effects of chronic alcoholism, and the subject of this Science of Chess post - epilepsy. In particular, though I started my research career in an fMRI lab, I spent my post-doctoral work and the first few years of my faculty position using electrophysiological methods (specifically event-related potentials or ERP) to measure neural activity in infants, children, and adults. During this unprovoked and synchronized bout of activity, however, the trouble is that those same behaviors can either be elicited by that neuronal firing when you don't want them to be (causing those muscle contractions and tremors I described above for example) and your ability to willfully do those things can be disrupted (leading to a transient inability to speak, for example).

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