Afeaturepublished in the Journal of the American Medical Association   account on the curious grammatical case of an   avalanche   dupe   who developed seizures in his left arm every time he tried to solve a Sudoku mystifier .

The subject ofthis studyis a 25 - year - sure-enough justly - handed student   who was buried under the C. P. Snow during a skiing trip . He experienced 15 minutes of generalised hypoxia , a condition in which the entire physical structure is deprived of sufficient O .

Hypoxia can involve the human body hard , potentially   leading to organ and neurological damage , and even death . Some athletes train at gamy height to pass on a mild state of hypoxia   in an travail to get their muscles used to lower level of atomic number 8 , thus gaining an reward in competitions .

The scholarly person ’s   prompt delivery reduced the amount of brain damage , but soon after recovery   the patient developed legal brief , unvoluntary twitching   of the legs   when walk   and   of the mouth   when talking .

A few weeks later , while trying to solve a Sudoku puzzler , he developed clonic seizures in his odd arm that only finish when he stopped trying to lick the puzzle .

Clonic raptus   are nonvoluntary spasms of the muscles that can either be   localized ( like in this case ) or world-wide . The capture more people might be familiar with are thetonic - clonic seizure , which touch on sufferer of epilepsy .

According to the newspaper ’s   researchers   –   Berend Feddersen of the University of Munich , Germany , and his co - source   –   the oxygen deficiency do a limited amount of damage to his brain . like seizures , known as automatic seizures , could also be triggered in the patient by other visual - spatial task ( for instance assort random numbers in a certain order ) but not by reading , writing , or puzzle out maths problem . This is not the first report to record such a condition ; calculations , notice game and board games have also beenreportedto induce epilepsy in affected role in the past tense .

The researcher also   reported that the affected role stopped solve Sudoku puzzle over five years ago and that he   has been raptus - free ever since .

Image Credit : Sudoku by Chotdavia Flickr . CC BY - NC - ND 2.0