After singer Chris Brown apparently suffered a seizure recently, his rep said the physical crisis was a result of the negativity and emotional stress of touring. Since that announcement, many medical experts mused that unless the star has an underlying seizure disorder such as epilepsy, what happened to him was probably not a seizure, the Grio reported.

Medical experts say there is little scientific proof to support the conclusion that stress can cause seizures—even among people with epilepsy. What’s more, doctors say, several conditions can cause activity that looks exactly like a seizure disorder to the untrained eye.

For example, emotional stress can cause a psychiatric condition called pseudoseizures, (a.k.a. psychogenic non-epileptic seizures). These seizure-like movements don’t stem from abnormal brain activity as they do in epilepsy, but are triggered by psychological responses directly tied to stress.

Experts say pseudoseizures are often misdiagnosed as real seizures because they can only be differentiated from each other by an EEG—a complicated exam showing electrical spikes in the brain during irregular activity—a test that’s often misread by non-specialist neurologists.

Other experts said that Brown’s seizure might also have been caused by a number of stress-related physical factors commonly known to throw off the brain’s electrical circuitry.

Seizures in non-epileptic patients are caused by a number of other factors, such as abruptly stopping alcohol use after drinking on a regular basis, having abnormal electrolyte levels in the blood, taking several prescription and over-the-counter drugs, using cocaine, and stopping seizure medications (such as Xanax) after daily use.

To read more about epilepsy diagnoses, treatment and prevalence in the African-American community, click here.