The Midnight Disease: the Drive to write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain.

THE MIDNIGHT DISEASE: The Drive to write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain ALICE W. FLAHERTY

The compulsive drive to write is called hypergraphia. Neuroscientists such as Flaherty are interested in how creative desire ebbs and flows and the connections between mood disorders and creativity. Flaherty here explains how the temporal lobes and limbic system of the brain engender creativity and trigger hypergraphia. She writes from the perspective of both scientist and writer who has experienced both hypergraphia and its opposite, writer's block. To explain the creative mechanics of the brain, she relates her own experience and that of some great writers. By example, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was a prodigious writer who suffered from spells of altered consciousness, mood swings, and seizures. Today, he would probably be diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy, the best-understood cause of hypergraphia, Vincent van Gogh painted feverishly and turned out long letters to his brother Theo daily, exhibiting the incredible drive that is a component .' of hypergraphia. Flaherty also explains how manic depression, or bipolar disorder, alters temporal lobe activity and is quite common among poets: Sylvia Plath is just one example. These people are inclined to suffer from seasonal affective disorder, which is exhibited in wintertime writing slumps, Flaherty asserts. HM, 2004, 307 p., b&w illus., hardcover, $24.00.