Musicophobia: When Your Favorite Song Gives You Seizures by Nikhil Swaminathan

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=musicophobia-when-your-fa
Stacey Gayle is what we would consider a normal person who loved music. She had many CD’s in her car of her favorite artists and was a active member of her church choir. Everything was fine until Stacey Gayle started having seizures. The first one occurred in her bedroom on March 3, 2005. She was 22 and her mother took her to the hospital from her home in Queens New York. The doctors were able to stabilize her but they could find no reason for the seizure. Later, she went to her friend’s cookout where she blacked out and started to shake uncontrollably.
The Seizures seemed to be occurring randomly until Stacey Gayle noticed a pattern in the spring of 2006. One of the top songs at the time was “Temperature” by Sean Paul and was played at almost every social outing. Every time Stacey Gayle heard the song, she would begin to seize. However, Gayle was afraid that no one would believe her story and told no one but her neurologist, Alan Ettinger at the Long Island Jewish Medical Center. He offered her many medications but none of them seemed to offer any real help. In order to treat Gayle, Ettinger and a colleague decided to try something new in early 2007. They monitored her for four days to see if she would have a seizure and put a cap over her head to try to observe her brainwaves. Nothing happened and therefore forcing them to release her and her I pod. That night, Gayle listened to “Temperature” and seized over three times. The doctors were amazed that what she said was true.
Throughout the next year Gayle responded in similar ways when songs such as “Umbrella” by Rihanna and “Beautiful Girls” by Sean Kingston came on. The only music that didn’t cause a seizure was classical or jazz, of which Gayle did not particularly like. She had to drop out of school because of people’s phone going off in class. “I remember sitting outside of stores in the mall and crying because I can’t even go shopping or sit in a restaurant and eat” Says Gayle. Doctors began to wonder if they could help her in any way since medication was not working and keeping music away from her was impossible.
The first time anyone heard of musicogenic epilepsy- seizures caused by music- was in a 1937 paper. Ashesh Mehta, a neurosurgeon at LIJ Epilepsy Center says that the condition is “exceedingly” rare and only 150 cases have been reported. Researcher Dan Friedman says that the people are not seizing because of a specific tune “but an emotional reaction to it.”
Scientists still do not know what causes epilepsy although 2.5 million Americans have it. The activity in the brain is very chaotic although it looks as if it were controlled. The brain becomes “unstable when activity patterns sync up” meaning that the brain activity during a seizure is one of activity falling into step says Mehta. Charles Schroeder, a neurologist in Ney York, says “music generates a pattern of rhythmic activity that if the rhythm is similar to a negative pattern that your brain has a tendency toward, the seizures.” When medications will not help, the only way to get rid of seizures is through surgery. They must take out enough, not too much to damage the brain.
Ettinger began to look in this same direction he told Gayle that in order to stop the seizures, he suggested that Mehta remove all of the brain cells that acted throughout her episodes. Gayle at first refused but then called Mehta and decided to do the surgery. This surgery was one of which only four people had ever had before. After some tests, Mehta found that the area of the overexcited brain cells was located in the lower section behind her right ear. Mehta sent her to a nuerophyschologist who put parts of her brain to sleep and gave her speech and memory tests, the areas left would be the ones Mehta would cut out. Gayle went through a surgery in September then one in October. Since then she has been seizure free. She also has had no mental side effects of her surgery.