FYI: What Causes Muscle Twitches?
Involuntary muscle twitches are exceedingly common and yet not very well understood. "Nearly everyone experiences it," Dr. Daniel Drachman, professor of neurology and neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University, told me. "It occurs spontaneously in well over 90 percent of people at one time or another." Right now, as I write this sentence, it's happening to me. My left eyelid is twitching uncontrollably. It is very annoying. The most common type of muscle twitches are "fasciculations." Fasciculations can occur in any muscle in the body, but, says Drachman, they tend to occur most noticeably in the limbs and the eyelids. Why Is My Eyelid Twitching? Fasciculations are the result of some kind of irritability of the nerve fibers. Because fasciculations are benign, they haven't been studied particularly deeply. (But, not all involuntary muscle twitches are fasciculations--more on that later.) So we don't really know even where in the ner...