'THE MIDNIGHT DISEASE' | A review Melding literary arts and science

A neurologist muses on the role of mental disorders in creativity.
By GRETCHEN GURUJAL
ASSOCIATED PRESS
"The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain," by Alice W. Flaherty (Houghton Mifflin, $24)
Battling her own postpartum mood disorder drove Massachusetts neurologist Alice W. Flaherty back to her pen and keyboard.
Her book, "The Midnight Disease," reflects her relentless passion for the scientific and the literary, both of which are included in her lofty survey of the human mind.
No victim of agraphia (loss of writing skills), writer's cramp or writer's block (each charted separately in her book), this literary scientist dissects her muse. In her bluest periods, Flaherty says, she scribbled to make sense of her inner voices. She wrestled the sometimes elating, sometimes tormenting "metaphors" that had taken over her usually empirical sensibilities.
In this precarious mental state, Flaherty writes, construction-site machinery appeared as plesiosaurs bellowing "limbic music," and the sight of a crow told her that an ominous question pressed the world. Flaherty braved these neurological storms by surrendering to hypergraphia, a manic desire to write. She then thrilled to her divine moments while, she acknowledges, her shattered "scientific self looked on with horror."
The result of her surrender to hypergraphia is a pointed and wise peek into the creative drive, explained through the caveats of the brain, the mental conditions of famous writers and the author's honest account of her own cranial demons.
Explaining the brain
What sets this book apart from others about the writing process are Flaherty's enlightening descriptions of the temporal lobes, the frontal lobe, the cerebral cortex, the limbic system, epileptic seizures, manic-depression, psychotic episodes, delusions and drugs, and how these relate to writing and inspiration.
Important in this probe are the frontal lobe, associated with realism, judgment, and cause and effect; and the temporal lobes, which dominate in more poetic work, philosophy and hypergraphia, Flaherty writes. These regions are interconnected in language comprehension and speech.
Unusual activity in the temporal lobes -- specifically temporal lobe epilepsy -- has been linked to Dostoevski, Lewis Carroll, Flaubert, Tennyson, Byron, Dante and Petrarch, among writers, and to Van Gogh and Schumann.
Acknowledging that epilepsy is not the only mental condition linked with prolific writing, Flaherty also explores depressive and manic tendencies and their probable effects on Hart Crane, Poe, Melville, Sylvia Plath, Churchill and others.
In a pragmatic yet inspired voice that should please both the scientific and the more abstract-minded, Flaherty says her findings do not rule out more aesthetic, less exacting translations. In fact, throughout the book, she calls for a uniting of science and the humanities, saying all insights depend on the "same soggy mass of neural tissue" -- a k a the brain.