A typical hypergraphia case gives a person the intense desire to write. The writing may be logical and coherent, or it may be a jumbled mess of words. For one 76-year-old woman, her case presented as rhyming and wistful poetry.
The woman went to the hospital in 2013 “complaining of memory problems and a tendency to lose her way in familiar locations,” as well as suffering from seizures, according to a case study in the journal Neurocase. Doctors diagnosed her with temporal lobe epilepsy and gave her a prescription for lamotrigine.
The medication stopped her seizures, but brought on the interesting side-effect of a compulsion to write poetry. She’d write 10 to 15 poems a day and most of them her husband described as doggerel (a style in which rhyme is forced or banal). She would become so consumed with her writing that any interruption would annoy her.
“It was highly unusual to see such a highly structured and creative hypergraphia without any of the other behavioral disturbances,” said the study’s author Jason Warren, a woman’s neurologist at University College London.
The writing urge slowly diminished months after the seizures stopped, but the condition still exists. Scientists have been studying her case to better understand the neurological basis for creativity, according to NewScientist. Hypergraphia is typically associated with epilepsy, although it rarely occurs.
Warren warns against drawing too many conclusions on the condition from this one case. Her experience could provide scientists with valuable insight into human behavior.
“So speculatively, this might suggest that there are brain circuits that create a highly structured behavior, which have been switched on somehow, like a computer program that has been launched to produce verse,” Warren said. “It’s very striking.”
A 58-year-old man presented with a similar case in 2005, according to a case study published in The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences. He also had symptoms of seizures, but had the added behavioral changes of irritability and anger.
He experienced words “continuously rhyming in his head,” and he had to write them down and share them with others. He would not speak in rhyme, read poetry or write excessively in nonrhyme, according to the study.
