Sudoku is a brain exercise involving numbers one to nine in nine horizontal rows that must correspond with nine vertical rows and nine boxes within the puzzle - but a man from Germany got much more than a brain exercise and suffered from seizures instead.
A 25-year-old German student had an accident during a ski trip and was buried under snow for 15 minutes. During that time, his brain did not receive the right amount of oxygen, causing him to respond with muscle jerks whenever he speaks or walks. He was solving a Sudoku puzzle when the clonic seizures happened in his left arm. However, when he stopped working on the puzzle, the seizures halted as well, according to CBS News.
Dr. Berend Feddersen took interest in this man and authored a study from the University of Munich which was then published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
"He had to be resuscitated but was extremely lucky that he survived," Feddersen said, according to NBC News.
Feddersen explained why the seizures happened.
"When he solves Sudoku, one of his strategies is to arrange the numbers in some 3-D manner," he said, according to Time. "That's very interesting, because when I do Sudoku, I just make trial and error. In order to solve a Sudoku, the patient used regions of his brain which are responsible for visual-spatial tasks. But exactly those brain parts had been damaged in the accident and then caused the seizures once they were used."
According to the study, despite the damage to his brain, all the man had to do is stop solving Sudoku puzzles. He has not suffered from a seizure in five years, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Watch a video about the man's condition here.
