Reading epilepsy

This is a report of a 21-year-old woman with reading epilepsy. Clinical and electroencephalographic (EEG) observations are presented while the patient read a news magazine in Spanish, read a magazine in English, read an announcement repetitively, viewed comic strips without legends, made a mathematical calculation. Only reading in Spanish produced clinical and EEG paroxysms. This case report supports the "communication" hypothesis as opposed to hypotheses that emphasize proprioceptive and other "lower order" stimuli in evoking seizures while reading.