They both start with tiny, barely perceptible tremors that lead up to a cataclysmic climax – and now it seems that the similarities between earthquakes and epileptic seizures run deep. Seismology could even hold the key to new ways of predicting and avoiding seizures.
A team led by neurologist Ivan Osorio of the University of Kansas in Kansas City compared the brain activity in 16,000 epileptic seizures with seismological data from 300,000 earthquakes. The team concludes in a non-peer-reviewed report (www.arxiv.org/abs/0712.3929) that the dynamics of the two kinds of event are very similar (see Diagram).
There are several…
