脑力游戏本该对大脑有益，但它们却给一个年轻人带来了惊人的副作用：引发癫痫，且癫痫导致他的左臂痉挛和抽搐。这名25岁的学生在遭遇了一次雪崩时被埋，其后不久就开始了癫痫发作，大脑缺氧了15分钟。几个星期后，当他试图解决一道数独题时，他突然四肢抽搐，研究人员在今日出版的《美国医学会杂志—神经学神经学》杂志上报告说。数独是一种九乘九的正方形网格，里面填有一些数字，，要解决数独，必须在其它空着的格子里填进遵循正确模式的数字。据论文的第一作者、德国慕尼黑大学神经学家Berend Feddersen所说，该男子当时正试图通过三维想象来解决数独。他越努力专注其中，他的手臂抖动得越厉害。根据核磁共振成像的扫描影像，研究人员将此次癫痫发作归因于该男子中央顶叶皮层(靠近头顶的大脑区域)右侧的受损抑制纤维组织。这个不寻常的病例表明，当抑制纤维被破坏，一个区域的大脑活动可能影响到周边区域——在这个病例中，即指控制手臂运动的那部分大脑，Feddersen说。尽管大脑出现了这样的损害，但解决方案很简单：这名男子不再玩停止了数独游戏，并已经有五年未发癫痫。

    原文链接：Man gets seizures from sudoku

    原文摘要：Mental puzzles are supposed to be good for the brain, but for one young man they had a surprising side effect: seizures that made his left arm jerk and twitch. The seizures started shortly after the 25-year-old student was buried in an avalanche, wher his brain was deprived of oxygen for 15 minutes. Several weeks later, the tremors came on when he tried to solve a sudoku puzzle, researchers report today in JAMA Neuroscience. Sudoku puzzles are 9-by-9 grids with numbers in some of the squares; to solve them, a person must fill in the other squares with the right pattern of numbers. According to neurologist Berend Feddersen from the University of Munich in Germany, who is first author on the paper, the man tried solving the puzzles by imagining them in 3D. The harder he focused, the more his arm moved. based on MRI scans, the researchers attribute the seizures to damaged inhibitory fibers on the right side of the man’s central parietal cortex, a brain region near the crown of the head. The unusual case suggests that when inhibitory fibers are damaged, brain activity in one area can spill into neighboring areas—in this case, the part of the brain that that controlled arm movement, Feddersen says. Despite this damage, the solution was simple: The man stopped tackling sudoku puzzles, and has been seizure-free for 5 years.