Epilepsy, also known as a seizure disorder, is a disorder that makes you have seizures. A seizure happens when some brain cells get too busy and start to send mixed up messages to the body. This results in things happening to the person's body that the person having the seizure did not intend to happen. Anything the brain can make the body do - see things, smell things, taste things, move, or even stare, can happen during a seizure.
Sometimes a person loses consciousness and muscle tone (which the body uses to stand up against gravity) and suddenly drops to the ground. This is called an atonic or drop seizure.
Sometimes they stiffen, fall to the ground and their whole body starts to jerk and shake. This is called a tonic-clonic seizure. It used to be called a grand mal seizure. The person is unconscious during a tonic-clonic seizure and does not remember anything that happened. They might know they had a seizure because their tongue might be bitten, they will feel bad, they'll be drowsy, they may have hurt themself and they may have wet their pants.
Sometimes a person goes unconscious and starts to stare for a couple of seconds, this is called an absence seizure. It used to be called a petit mal seizure.There are seizures that only affect your consciousness, these are called 'absence' seizures, because it is like you are absent from your surroundings for a few seconds. The person having an absence seizure just stares and does not notice input from any of his five senses, but does not fall down. These seizures are often confused with staring into space and daydreaming.
Simple partial seizures are seizures that only affect part of the brain. They are the only kind of seizure where you are not unconscious. Sensory simple partial seizures are when you taste, see, or smell something that really isn't there, maybe a bad smell, a bad taste, or little spots flying around in the air. Motor simple partial seizures are when one part of your body starts to shake and you can't stop it. Simple partial seizures can be very scary, because you actually know that something wrong is happening.
Complex partial seizures are sometimes mistaken for sleepwalking, but they're not, they're seizures. In a complex partial seizure, the person can walk and looks awake, and can sometimes even say a bunch of jumbled up words that don't make any sense. Sometimes it looks like the person is conscious, but they're not really. They may say or do things that seem to make sense, but they don't know that they are doing them.
Gelastic seizures, mistaken sometimes for "the sillies", are when someone starts to laugh for no reason. This is a rare kind of seizure.
There are other rare kinds of seizures, but these are the most known.
