Welcome to the Brain Health Revolution podcast with your hosts, Aisha and Dean Shirazai.

I'm very excited to be here today because today we'll talk about the fascinating diagnosis

and the fascinating world of epilepsy and seizures. And we wanted to give some examples of some

historical figures who have had seizures and epilepsy and how they dealt with it and all the

human stories around it. The reason we approach our podcast in this way is because we think that the diseases that we talk about, hopefully in human terms, give us insight not just into the diseases themselves that people experience by the millions, but also in the human experience in general.

These diseases are about human consciousness.

It's about human struggles and striving in spite of these incredible

conditions of consciousness of the mind. In fact, you and I, whenever we've seen

this a lot, we get called to the emergency room and there's an altered mental status.

That's a common diagnosis. It's a very common reason for consulting the neurology department.

And as soon as we get that, it's a whole spectrum from complete coma to some confusion and delirium.

But whenever something like this happens, we always say there's something

that has to happen in the cortex that involves both cortices. It either is involving both sides

of the brain at the same time or there's a spread from one side to the other because there's

no way that you can you can have altered mental status without the brain

the totality of the brain being affected so how can it be affected either there's a mass effect

where there's a pressure in the brain that pushes the brain and affects the the base of the brain

where consciousness resides reticular activating centers and others, or there's a

chemical process where there's an alteration in a chemical milieu and environment of the brain

where the brain in totality is affected, or there is a pharmaceutical phenomenon or toxin

or infection that involves the totality or the very common

one is seizures when we'll get into the details of what focal and generalized seizure but in seizures

...