Two decades ago, neurologist Ivan Osorio realized that he and his peers were stuck. Specifically, they were "making little progress" understanding "one of medicine's most intriguing intellectual challenges" - sudden, often debilitating surges of brain electrical activity known as epileptic seizures.

So Osorio decided to look outside clinical medicine. He discovered that seizures share similarities with a much larger phenomenon: earthquakes. He reasoned that laws describing earthquake behavior could, when applied to the brain, reveal new clues about what happens during epileptic seizures.