A brief refractory state
Patients with epilepsy present abnormal activity in specific brain areas, resulting in the development of seizures. The removal of these epileptic regions is often the best treatment available. Seizure-originating tissue is thought to be chronically dysfunctional; however, it is unclear how epileptic tissue responds to cognitive stimuli before, during, and after seizures. Now, Liu et al. detected and analyzed brain oscillations in nonlesional epileptic tissue of patients while performing cognitive tasks. The author found that the epileptic tissue generated physiological responses to cognitive stimuli except when the stimulus arrived at the 1-s window preceding seizure. The results suggest that the epileptic tissue might not be as chronically impaired as previously thought.
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