Arithmetic Seizures

 

A 1982 paper in the Annals of Neurology details the curious case of an English-Canadian patient who got seizures when he did mental arithmetic.

He first started getting seizures when he was 12 years old, and found they typically came while he was playing card games – at least once when he was calculating a score – and when he was doing crosswords, as well as general mental maths. What makes it even weirder is that not just any kind of maths triggered the seizures: Multiplication and division did, but addition and subtraction generally did not.

The authors of the paper write: "Tasks involving multiplication, division, and manipulation of spatial information were significantly associated with discharges, but few, if any, discharges appeared when addition and subtraction tasks of equivalent difficulty were performed."

Twenty years earlier doctors had coined the term epilepsia arithmetices to describe a form of epilepsy where mental arithmetic causes seizures in another patient – but only a handfulof patients have ever been found to have it.

 

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