{"id":578,"date":"2008-06-06T20:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-06-07T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=578"},"modified":"2008-06-06T20:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-06-07T04:00:00","slug":"the-midnight-disease","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/the-midnight-disease\/","title":{"rendered":"The Midnight Disease"},"content":{"rendered":"
The French newspaper Le Monde<\/span>‘s literary house-blogger<\/a>, Pierre Assouline, in his latest post translates and queries a definition of Hypergraphia <\/span>as given by Webster\u2019s New World Medical Dictionary.<\/span><\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

Definition of Hypergraphia<\/span><\/p>\n

Hypergraphia: The driving compulsion to write; the overwhelming urge to write. Hypergraphia may compel someone to keep a voluminous journal, to jot off frequent letters to the editor, to write on toilet paper if nothing else is available, and perhaps even to compile a dictionary. Hypergraphia is the opposite of writer’s block.<\/p>\n

Temporal lobe epilepsy is associated with hypergraphia. This association has been known at least as early as 1974 (Waxman SG, Geschwind N. Hypergraphia in temporal lobe epilepsy. Neurology. 1974;24:629-36). A number of prolific writer may have had temporal lobe epilepsy, including Byron, Dante, Dostoevsky, Moli\u00e8re, Petrarch, Poe, and Tennyson.<\/p>\n

Hypergraphia has also been called the midnight disease.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

Why midnight? asks Assouline, before noting that French dictionaries do not mention hypergraphia, though there is a three words definition proposed for the term “graphomanie:” “besoin pathologique d’\u00e9crire” (“the pathological need to write” \u2014 which takes 5 words in English) before referring the reader back to “graphorr\u00e9e” (graphorrhea \u2014 the English definition of which is given as ” The writing of long lists of meaningless words, as occurs in some manic disorders” by The American Heritage\u00ae Medical Dictionary) and “graphomanie” (graphomania).<\/p>\n

Indeed, why the midnight disease? That time-slot seems pretty normal for normal writing to most. Right now, given my US-Europe jet-lag (that West-East displacement is the one I feel most) it is 4 a.m. that feels the likely moment when writing turns into mania. So I’ll stop here & try to get some shuteye.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The French newspaper Le Monde‘s literary house-blogger, Pierre Assouline, in his latest post translates and queries a definition of Hypergraphia as given by Webster\u2019s New World Medical Dictionary. Definition of Hypergraphia Hypergraphia: The driving...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=578"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}