The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain (.) [Hardcover]

Alice Weaver Flaherty (Author)

Book Description

Series: . | Publication Date: January 6, 2004

What underlies the human ability, desire, and even compulsion to write? Alice Flaherty first explores the brain state called hypergraphia - the overwhelming desire to write - and the science behind its antithesis, writer's block. As a leading neurologist at a major research hospital, Flaherty writes from the front lines of brain research. Her voice, driven and surprisingly original, has its roots in her own experiences of hypergraphia, triggered by a postpartum mood disorder. Both qualifications lend power to Flaherty's riveting connection between the biology of human longing and the drive to communicate.
The Midnight Disease charts exciting new territory concerning the roles of mind and body in the creative process. Flaherty - whose engagement with her patients and lifelong passion for literature enrich each page - argues for the importance of emotion in writing, illuminates the role that mood disorders play in the lives of many writers, and explores with profound insight the experience of being "visited by the muse." Her understanding of the role of the brain's temporal lobes and limbic system in the drive to write challenges the popular idea that creativity emerges solely from the right side of the brain. Finally, The Midnight Disease casts lights on the methods and madness of writers past and present, from Dostoevsky to Conrad, from Sylvia Plath to Stephen King.
The Midnight Disease brings the very latest brain science to bear on the most compelling questions surrounding human creativity.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Flaherty (The Massachusetts General Handbook of Neurology) mixes memoir, meditation, compendium and scholarly reportage in an odd but absorbing look at the neurological basis of writing and its pathologies. Like Oliver Sacks, Flaherty has her own story to tell a postpartum episode involving hypergraphia and depression that eventually hospitalized her. But what holds this great variety of material together is not the medical authority of a doctor, the personal authority of the patient or even the technical authority of the writer, but the author's deep ambivalence about the proper approach to her subject. Where Sacks uses his stylistic gifts to transform illness into literature, Flaherty wrestles openly with the problem of equating them, putting her own identity as a scientist and as a writer on the line as she explores the possibility of describing writing in medical terms. She details the physiological sources of the impulse to write, and of the creative drive, metaphorical construction and the various modes of stalled or evaded productivity called block. She also includes accounts of what it feels like to write (or fail to write) by Coleridge and Joan Didion as well as by aphasiacs and psychotics. But while science may help one to understand or create literature, "it may not fairly tell you that you should." To a student of literature, Flaherty's struggle between scientific rationalism and literary exuberance is familiar romantic territory. What's moving about this book is how deeply unresolved, in an age of mood pills and weblogs, that old schism remains. Writers will delight in the way information and lore are interspersed; scientists are more likely to be divided.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

"Researchers will soon be able to see which patterns of brain activity underlie creativity," Flaherty claims. By offering some powerful physiological theories for the creative process, Flaherty debunks the idea that creativity stems from psychological inspiration. A few impenetrable parts notwithstanding, she eloquently translates scientific information into layman's terms, instilling her narrative with fascinating literary and personal anecdotes and practical advice for writers. Citing skimpy evidence, scientists might take issue with Flaherty's claims. Yet Flaherty, who tries to remain impartial, expresses a deep ambivalence about the correct approach to creativity. The book, she emphasizes, is "not meant to be the final word on these complex subjects, but to spur further debate." For us locos, it certainly will.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (January 6, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618230653
• ISBN-13: 978-0618230655
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #346,349 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars When writers are driven......, April 20, 2004

By 

Gary C. Marfin (Sugar Land, Texas USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain (.) (Hardcover)

Hypergraphia, about which I knew nothing prior to reading this book, is the medical term for an over-powering desire to write. Writing, Dr. Flaherty tell us, is the domain of the cerebral cortex, but the desire to write is the domain of the limbic system -- the hypothalamus and the structures of the temporal lobe. It is altered temporal lobe activity that is associated with creativity. On the other hand, frontal lobe processes are involved in writer's block. This area, as science, struck me as new and very much evolving. The most interesting section of the book, even more speculative than the location of writing proclivities, is her commentary on the inner voice and its role in writing. This is an area where strands fuse -- religion, creativity, psychosis. For Dr. Flaherty it was one morning "that bristled with significance. The way a crow flapped its wings as it rose heavily off the ground was a semaphore, signalling something just past my understanding." And not long after she heard, "the opposite of writer's block," her signal to write about hypergraphia. This internal/external presence of a voice became manifest to her following a depression brought on by the death of twin infants. Remarkably, if not miraculously, she later gave birth to another set of twins, thriving at the time of her writing. This is an unusual book. She interweaves her personal history and her clinical training. Coupled with a wide and diverse reading, Dr. Flaherty demonstrates in this book an intense mind; reading her is like riding with a mind in over-drive. I look forward to her next book, and she has all but assured us that one is in the making.

33 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stimulating, moving...and witty, December 27, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain (.) (Hardcover)

As a teacher of English composition, I am often given silly self-help books on writer's block, and I also generally shy away from dry scientific books about the brain and language. This book is neither. For one thing, its writing is surprisingly lyrical. And, although it doesn't offer any panaceas for writing problems, it teaches you how to look for solutions that will work for your particular problem. As a bonus, there are many fascinating anecdotes about literary figures.

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Informative and compelling, January 28, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain (.) (Hardcover)

I picked up this book after hearing the author on NPR, and I figured I'd skim through it. Instead, I was completely drawn in by the mix of science, historical anecdote, and moving personal story that Dr. Flaherty has assembled. We've all suffered from writer's block at one point or another but I'd never heard of hypergraphia, and the things she has to say about how the brain works and can cause creative disorders are totally fascinating. I plan to recommend this book to all my writer friends.