Spatiotemporal dynamics of human epileptic seizures

Epilepsy is often called a window to the brain because it offers a unique opportunity for scientists to study and understand the function of thecircuitry of the human brain during a fairly well defined and relatively simpler state, the epileptic seizure. We have previously shown that electricalactivity recorded from cerebral cortex and generated by human epileptogenic foci exhibits certain mathematical characteristics of chaotic signals. Wewill present results that show that the epileptic seizure unfolds as a transition from spatiotemporal chaos to spatial order and temporal chaos, tospatiotemporal chaos, and that the key factor of this transition is a slow entrainment process among cortical and subcortical structures beginningminutes prior to a seizure manifestation. This spatiotemporal entrainment begins locally within cortical and hippocampal structures with subsequentcommunication between themselves.