No food for 70 years? ‘Starving yogi’ states it’s true

By Brian Alexander, contributor

The student naval aviator was flying in formation — a high pressure maneuver anytime, but especially when you’re still trying to make the grade — when he suddenly started laughing. Hysterically laughing. Laughing so hard he endangered the flight.

This wasn’t the first time the man had broken out in uncontrollable laughter at a seemingly strange moment. In fact, the young pilot had been waking up other members of his household in the middle of night as he, sound asleep, broke out in peals of laughter.

As it turned out, the pilot, who showed no other symptoms, was experiencing a rare form of epileptic episode called gelastic seizure. The main symptom of a gelastic seizure is uncontrolled laughter.

Laughing or crying at inappropriate moments, or out of context to one’s circumstances — crying in the middle of a lecture, for example, or laughing at a funeral — is something most of us experience at least once.

However, as the case of the pilot illustrates, there can be a variety of underlying causes for these ill-timed outbursts. Multiple sclerosis, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease), stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, or any number of conditions can cause brain lesions or damage the communications between different parts of the brain. The result is pathological laughing or crying, also sometimes called involuntary emotional expression disorder.

source : pheedo.msnbc.msn.com

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