Because the thread on the CC drifted into creativity, I thought this might be of interest. The researcher began her work at Harvard and has been expanding it for almost a decade:
http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/booksellers/press_release/flaherty/
In The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain (Houghton Mifflin, January), neurologist Alice W. Flaherty explores the hows and whys of writing, revealing the science behind hypergraphia. Why is it that some writers struggle for months to come up with the perfect sentence or phrase, while others, hunched over a notepad or keyboard deep into the night, seem unable to stop writing?
The initial research began in 1994:
http://www.harvardmagazine.com/on-line/010441.html
My interest in this is very personal, since my writing is definitely related to the effects of a brain trauma and resulting seizures. It is fair to say I have a "compulsion" to write and create. No idea why, but I can sit overnight and complete a full-length work following a seizure. Fun, fun, fun.
I don't know.
I fit into both categories - there are times when I sit fighting with how to express something for days, weeks and months - sometimes, years and in some rare occasions, decades. Why? Maybe I didn't know enough about what I was trying to express to express it well enough for me to understand. Maybe I wasn't confident enough in what I thought. It happens, I think, to everyone who writes.
On the flip side, there are nights when I sit at the keyboard and hammer out 'blog entries' that may as well be considered essays. That's considered bad form for a weblogger, they say, because people only want bite size chunks of information that serve a short attention span. But I don't write for anyone but myself. I don't write for the audience as I write for the need to express something to those willing to read, and if they are unwilling to read...
The brain is a wonderful thing. It's quite possible that what everyone is trying to explain is in the interaction between the amygdala and the left frontal lobe; where logic and emotion are balanced (or so we think right now).
Hypergraphia. I'd have to say that hypergraphia is simply a basic need to get something from the inside out, and in doing so we leave a trail of characters in the hope that it makes sense to someone else. :-)
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