An otherwise healthy 20-year-old man arrived at a Tokyo hospital with impaired consciousness after drinking a large amount of alcohol from the previous evening into the early morning. Doctors noticed something alarming: his eyes were sliding slowly and smoothly from one side to the other and back again, every three to four seconds.
The pattern is called ping-pong gaze, and in an unconscious patient it usually points to serious damage on both sides of the brain. In this young man, it was the alcohol. Within three hours, his consciousness and his eye movements returned to normal on their own.
