‘Babel’ Sickness and Pokemon Seizures

Puzzle and Brain Games

May 2nd, 2007 |

Back in 1997, over 700 school children were rushed to emergency rooms across Japan with seizures after watching an episode of Pokemon (even more children were affected when the inciting clip was replayed on the evening news).

In all, supposedly over 12,000 children became ill (many with milder symptoms).

How could a cartoon do this?

It turns out that certain frequencies and colors of flashing lights can induce seizures in people who already have epilepsy (i.e., a tendency to have seizures)

A seizure is an "arrhythmia" of the brain; a storm of abnormal electrical activity flowing through neurons

‘Babel’ Sickness

According to several news sources, this phenomenon has reared its head again in Japan with the film Babel (great movie, by the way).

Numerous people became sick after watching the scene involving Japanese actress Rinko Kikuchi dancing in a club with flashing strobe lights.

Interestingly, this sort of thing is intentionally performed as a provocative maneuver whenever a patient undergoes testing for seizures with an EEG (electroencephalogram). A small portion of the test involves ‘photic stimulation’ with a bright flickering light.

Share This Post:

Filed under: Brain, Smartkit All Posts Post tags: babel, eeg, Pokemon, rinko-kikuchi, seizures, strobe-lights

2 Responses to “‘Babel’ Sickness and Pokemon Seizures”

babelmon | Guest May 7th, 2007 - 3:38 pm

Is it just me, or the Japanese audiences are more prone to visual-induced sickness? I wonder why they never get sick on watching Battle Royale 1+2… Anyway, if the movie is such a health hazard, Japanese government should not even allow it to be shown AT ALL, instead of selectively enforcing the rules like what happened to that infamous Pokemon episode.
John Lewis Highsmith | Guest May 11th, 2007 - 9:01 pm

One important element in the book “The Andromeda Strain”, by Michael Crichton, was the effect of a flashing light on one of the characters.

Here is a quote from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain_(film)

“When filming the scene in the movie where Dr. Ruth Levitt has an epileptic seizure due to watching a blinking red light, care had to be taken when choosing the frequency of the blinking, so it was the least likely frequency to induce seizures among the theater audience.”