I had epileptic seizures due to a trauma. I felt them coming and learned how to stop them from occurring. A few years I was taking a medication, and every few weeks I had to deal with a feeling of a coming seizure. So I ended with a hypothesis that brain needs new stimuli to stop seizure. It needs something new coming, so it would be forced to change current activity from those crap it is trying to do now to something else. I was young and stupid, and my first seizure was in some way hand-made: a feeling of coming seizure was mysterious for me then, and I decided to explore it "scientifically". I learned how to strengthen it, and I was doing it for some time. The trick was to concentrate on any stimulus, to pick something "constant" from a sensory input and to shrink my attention to just that element of sensory input. Though "constant" it not in a physical way constant, in a mind's way: it feels constant, but in reality it is just highly predictable.
So my hypothesis about K448 is this is surprises at work. It somehow follow music laws, but you never know what happen next. Voices sometimes go along, then they go different ways. Is it one voice? Or two? Or five? Would it be trill in the end of phrase, or some straw arpeggio? When music will become loud, when soft? This music holds attention of listener and so it guides mind processes externally.
Though, it is just a wild guess based on an anecdotal data about epilepsy and single listening of K448. I invented "surpriseability" of a piece of music just now, and I didn't try to listen some other piece of music to compare its "surpriseability" to those of K448.
Thanks for sharing! How did you direct yourself away from seizing? Was there one moment where they stopped completely, or was it a gradual improvement?
I heard an anecdote about how the actor Danny Glover willed himself out of having seizures. Looking it up, epilepsy.com says they stopped "for reasons unknown", which seems interesting. I can see a community of people who haven't managed to escape from a negative bucket not wanting to believe it's possible.
I've also heard of research into brain implants that disrupt seizures before they start, which sounds similar to what you're saying (but more invasive).
My uncle has suffered from (trauma-related) epilepsy for a long time. He's been to lots of specialists but nothing has worked. I wonder if there's anything he can do mentally to grab onto the edges of the experience and divert it. IMO, when it comes to medicine, people can be too willing to trust the experts, and give up their own agency/internal feedback in the process.
It was a gradual improvement. These feelings (deja vu) became less sharp, less frequent, but more sticky, they were harder to shake them off. Then it stopped. I didn't finished a medication course, the doctor said I needed to take drugs for five years, I stopped to take them after a four years, because of side effects. But in a ten years or so it stopped completely. It is detectable in EEG -- I scared the shit from a teacher on a practical class while studying psychology: we learned about EEG, and so I was wearing EEG cap, sitting in a dark room with flashing lights, while my classmates watched my EEG, and she darted into the room, asking me how I feel, "is everything is ok?" It was ok, but she was scared by asymmetry in alpha-rhythms of my brain hemispheres, I saw it with my own eyes on the screen. So something detectable remains in my brains, but I feel nothing. For 10+ years.
> I can see a community of people who haven't managed to escape from a negative bucket not wanting to believe it's possible.
> I wonder if there's anything he can do mentally to grab onto the edges of the experience and divert it.
Yeah, someone told me that I really couldn't control seizures, because it is impossible, and therefore I just thought that I controlled them. Like the process goes by itself, and my conscious interpretation of them is an illusion of control. Something like rationalization. It made me to think. So I really do not know how it was. But then I've read Arnhild Lauveng "A Road Back from Schizophrenia", where the author describes how she became schizophrenic and then healed (an astonishing memoir, a look from the inside of the mind, that turns schizophrenic from normal and then somehow manages to get back, I believe you'd enjoy it), and how other people do not believe her, because schizophrenia cannot be healed, and I do not mind now whether my interpretation of my epilepsy is rationalization or not. It just is.
But in any case, scientifically speaking, I'm not sure that conscious efforts can help against an epilepsy: all I have is one data point, while brains is a very complex system, 1000 data points wouldn't be enough. But speaking as an error-prone human being I'm sure as hell that it could help. It might be difficult or even impossible to help patient from outside, because a psychotherapist cannot know how it feels from the inside in this particular case. Spoken language is not powerful enough to bridge the gap between minds, Lauveng shows this perfectly. Every individual need to discover her mind by herself and to find some levers to manage it. Maybe in my case the decisive thing was my "scientific" study of my deja vu before seizures started: I had a plenty of time to play with them. To strengthen it to a point when it became scary, to shake it off because I was too scared by it. I remember deja vu from my childhood (I had a trauma at ~3yo), though I became interested in them only in my teens.
So my hypothesis about K448 is this is surprises at work. It somehow follow music laws, but you never know what happen next. Voices sometimes go along, then they go different ways. Is it one voice? Or two? Or five? Would it be trill in the end of phrase, or some straw arpeggio? When music will become loud, when soft? This music holds attention of listener and so it guides mind processes externally.
Though, it is just a wild guess based on an anecdotal data about epilepsy and single listening of K448. I invented "surpriseability" of a piece of music just now, and I didn't try to listen some other piece of music to compare its "surpriseability" to those of K448.