What happens to the brain and body during a generalized seizure?

What happens to the brain and body during a generalized seizure?

Charles Ribak, Ph.D. (Professor of Anatomy and Neurobiology, UC Irvine School of Medicine) gives expert video advice on: What happens to the brain and body during a generalized seizure?; What do I do if I think I'm going to have a generalized seizure?; What do I do if I see someone having a generalized seizure? and more...

We can measure the brain activity during a generalized seizure and one of the things that we can do when we capture this in an EEG recording is that we see a great deal of spike and wave activity. Spike and wave activity indicates that there are cluster of large numbers of neurons in different parts of the brain that are synchronized in their activity. They'll have a burst of activity and then they'll get quiet again, and then they'll have another burst maybe for a period of time and get quiet again. This is brain activity, electrical activity that we can see during a seizure. In terms of the body, the motor cortex is activating all of the muscles of the body and so we can see various types of movements that we discussed in some of the earlier questions. We might see the tonic activity, where the arms and legs are extended outward, for example the arm would go out and would probably start trembling a little, or we might see clonic activity, where there is some flexion going on of the arms and also of the legs.