Porygon Was Innocent: An epileptic perspective on the infamous Pokémon episode

> These include Absence Seizures, when a person stops what they are doing altogether, loses awareness but does not collapse or have visible convulsions; Myoclonic Seizures, when a person’s limbs suddenly jerk uncontrollably but they remain conscious and aware; and Tonic Clonic Seizures where a person loses consciousness, collapses, and their whole body convulses.

I've witnessed something that I've never seen described anywhere – a very similar thing to an 'absence seizure', but the person is still aware and responding but seem unable to break away from the empty stare even when they try.

There are all kinds of presentations for seizures. Ones in the frontal lobe are particularly hard to catch based on external presentation. If one is suspected of having seizures they will get a continuously monitored EEG where times associated where the seizure like state is monitored electrically. Sometimes it's a really weird presentation of a seizure or sometimes it's psychogenic. Either way it's good to have these people get some help I'd it keeps happening.

This is the first time I came across this somewhere else other than this one person I know that has this. Fascinating.

This movie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looker

is usually panned but it has a lot of great ideas in it including a light pulse gun that reliably causes absence seizures. Probably my favorite weapon from sci-fi movies although I have a soft spot for the zap gun out of Battlefield Earth which must be like one of those ray guns that Hubbard thought people have been using to implant us with bad ideas for trillions of years.

Just a bit ahead of its time it's like a 1984 movie that came out in 1981.

That sounds like a focal aware (simple partial) seizure. There are other things that it could be but if you want to search, you could try starting with those keywords.

I knew someone who would get seizures when sleep deprived and was aware during them.

I only saw one once. He was sitting on a couch, clutching a pillow in front of him, and kept shoving his face into the pillow. At the time, I wasn't aware of his seizures, and asked him if he was good. He just said "I'm fine, I'm having a seizure. Just give me a minute and it will pass."

Sure enough, after a minute or two, he stopped, explained the situation, and said he needed to call it a night before it happened again.