{"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":"<div style=\"text-align: justify;\">The French newspaper <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Le Monde<\/span>\u2018s literary <a href=\"http:\/\/passouline.blog.lemonde.fr\/livres\">house-blogger<\/a>, Pierre Assouline, in his latest post translates and queries a definition of <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Hypergraphia <\/span>as given by  <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Webster\u2019s New World Medical Dictionary.<\/span><\/div>\n<p><\/p>\n<div style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;\">Definition of Hypergraphia<\/span><\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s block.<\/p>\n<p>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<p>Hypergraphia has also been called the midnight disease.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<div style=\"text-align: justify;\">Why midnight? asks Assouline, before noting that French dictionaries do not mention hypergraphia, though there is a three words definition proposed for the term \u201cgraphomanie:\u201d \u201cbesoin pathologique d\u2019\u00e9crire\u201d (\u201cthe pathological need to write\u201d \u2014 which takes 5 words in English) before referring the reader  back to \u201cgraphorr\u00e9e\u201d (graphorrhea \u2014 the English definition of which is given as \u201d The writing of long lists of meaningless words, as occurs in some manic disorders\u201d by The American Heritage\u00ae Medical Dictionary) and \u201cgraphomanie\u201d (graphomania).<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019ll stop here & try to get some shuteye.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The French newspaper Le Monde\u2018s 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&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/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}]}}