Mental activity or thinking may induce epileptic seizures: this is what patients often report. However such seizures have been rarely documented. After several seizures occurred at age 12, on the occasion of an acute episode of probable encephalitic, this 24-year-old, right-handed man had partial seizures starting at age 18. at the beginning seizures were spontaneous. Later on they had been induced by a metallic noise. After a few years seizures began to be precipitated by the idea itself of the activating situation or by the thought the patient was in front of the activating situation. Seizures start with an auditory sensation and a feeling of fear, followed by loss of contact, deviation of his head and eyes toward the right side and a twitching of the right side of the face with his right arm flexed and abducted and secondary generalization. During video-EEG monitoring we recorded three of his usual seizures. One of them was induced by reproducing the trigger situation and the remaining two occurred while he was talking about the modality of his seizure's presentation. After several spontaneous seizures, the activation of a neuronal network inside the temporal lobe could be responsible of a facilitation due to acoustic stimulation, causing the possibility of reflex seizures. By frequent repetition of stimulation, such a network could have become highly sensitive to mental activity evocating the imaging of initial trigger.
