What is a Seizure and How Can It Affect the Brain?

The brain never sleeps as long as you are alive. This beautiful and complex organ is our center of control and is always performing tasks to allow us to live our lives as we wish (within reason, of course).

A healthy brain is great at keeping you safe and ready for action. It also takes care of regulating bodily functions, monitors vital organs, sends out signals, and keeps a watchful eye on hormone production (among many others). 

But what happens when there’s a brain malfunction? Sadly, there are situations when the brain can return an error, and sometimes, this results in a seizure. 

Since these can be quite scary for both the person experiencing it and those around them, today we’ll have a quick look at what a seizure is and how it can affect our center of control. 

What is a Seizure?

The standard definition of a seizure pegs it as a sudden, uncontrolled electrical disturbance in the brain. When this happens, the person having a seizure can lose consciousness, can have impaired movements, and can experience a series of other behaviors that are not within the range of what’s seen as normal.

Seizures manifest differently depending on where they happen in the brain, but they do disrupt the brain’s regular activity. Also, they can be short (a couple of seconds) or they can affect a larger part of the brain and keep going for a couple of minutes. However, if the disruption lasts more than five minutes, it is considered a medical emergency. 

What Causes a Seizure?

There are a few health conditions that can cause you to have a seizure such as high fever, sleep deprivation, low blood sugar, or even brain trauma or tumor. In a nutshell, anything that disrupts the electrical signal between neurons can lead to a seizure. 

Epilepsy is a Common Cause of Seizures

A person having several unprovoked seizures (without an obvious cause) in a short time interval may have epilepsy. 

Now, what is epilepsy?

In short, epilepsy is a neurological disorder that causes surges of electricity to disrupt your brain activity, causing seizures and impacting your quality of life. Because the seizures activate nearby neurons, an epileptic seizure can result in uncontrolled movements and changes in emotions and behavior.

Plus, each person that suffers from epilepsy experiences the world in a unique way. Depending on the location and intensity of the seizures, the symptoms vary from mild to severe. Also, people who suffer extreme seizures could have long-lasting damage to their brain and may not be able to function without proper treatment and help. 

Types of Seizures

The medical community categorizes seizures into two main categories: focal and generalized. Focal seizures are localized in one area of the brain and can occur with or without loss of consciousness. On the other hand, generalized seizures involve all the areas of the brain and can manifest in a variety of ways. 

For example, the type of seizure we often see in movies, when the patient convulses and needs to be restrained, is a generalized grand mal seizure that can sometimes last for a couple of minutes.

Living With Seizures

It’s important to know that having one seizure doesn’t mean you will have another one in your lifetime. Seizures can be a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence if you don’t have an underlying health condition to cause them.

Also, if you take care of your health and take the right measures to boost your brainpower you may be one of the lucky individuals who never get to experience such a scary episode. However, if you have a predisposition, it doesn’t mean you won’t be able to enjoy life – there are treatments and other options that can help keep the symptoms under control or eliminate them altogether.