'Creativitis’

While waiting at a doctor’s office, a friend pinched a magazine he said with me in mind. He was so excited to show me why he wanted to steal it in my behalf. There it was, an article called "The Incurable Disease of Writing" by Paula Byron in the Harvard Medical Alumni Bulletin (Autumn 2003). I did not know whether to be flattered or insulted right away because I had not read the article yet. Although the article being in a medical magazine under "neuroscience" sort of clued me in that he must be thinking I was somewhat "not normal" in a bio-chemical sort of way and just could not tell me during regular conversation.

Well, it turned out, I should neither be flattered nor insulted because I do not have "hypergraphia," this obsession and compulsion to write stuff described by Dr. Alice Flaherty, the "hypergraphic" doctor interviewed by Byron for the article. Although, I really wished that if I had any mental disease, that it be that. It is the opposite of writer’s block. Hypergraphia is when someone feels and actually undertakes writing as if it were an autonomic feature of their brain, like breathing, but at the same time, they feel such joy in doing it and could not stop, unlike with breathing where you often just take it for granted. Hypergraphics write on toilet papers, table napkins, on their clothes, on their arms, in post-it notes at a pace parallel to the thoughts they are thinking which is practically all the time. Flaherty herself wrote the "Massachusetts General Handbook of Neurology" within a year. They do not write only when angst fills them. They write because writing seems to be a natural overflow of their thoughts, whether they have angst or joy or anything in-between. (I wondered about vandals but dropped them from the list after I realized they only do it when people are not looking which makes them really just cowards and destroyers of property). Flaherty pointed out to research showing that hypergraphia involved distinct changes in activities in the temporal lobes of our brains. She even cited the writer Dostoevsky whose literary gift may have been in part due to his having had "temporal lobe epilepsy." People who are diagnosed to have this kind of condition, she said, exhibit "strong religious philosophical interests." Now, I could never anymore think of Philosophy departments and not be curious about the temporal lobes of its inhabitants. Hypergraphia is a sickness, she said, because it overwhelms and replaces other forms of expression that are available to human beings, not to mention the fact that you can alienate people around you when you start asking everyone at the table for their table napkins so you could write your regular journal entry. Also, it is one thing to write a manuscript letter of your childhood woes to your parents but another when you do it while they are seated in the same room with you. I am still not sure whether those constitute a disease. But when someone starts writing their comment on the dinner on my sleeve, I think it is pretty safe to say it is hypergraphia whether in my book or the Harvard Journal of Medicine.

But of all the mental diseases, I really like this one. It is funny in a deep sort of way and very interesting to me as a writer. Notwithstanding the extreme expressions of this disease, I am fascinated by the way it "medicalizes" creativity, short of saying you have "creativitis" (I invented this term) like when you eat too much carrots and you literally turn orange and the doctors tell you that have "carotinitis" (this is a real medical term). Its potential for humor is greater than the threat of death it poses.

Personally, I am a fan of heroic attempts in science and other fields to understand this thing called "creativity" in humans. When I think about these attempts, I have an image in my mind of someone trying to catch multi-colored leaves in a storm. You know you will never catch them all to get a whole picture and form back a whole branch, tree or forest in its many seasons but to catch one gives you a glimpse of it, gives you the feeling of being connected to a largeness you will never feel if you do not chase after any.

An infinite amount of things are happening inside and outside our bodies and we humans all have 100 billion neurons each in our brains that fire and connect with each other to have a shot at looking at the same old world differently whether through science, the arts, literature, even in politics or economics. At some point though, the fruit of your creativity is beyond the sole reach of neurobiology. You sense a wholeness when you cross the boundaries where the trillions of synapses (neuron-to-neuron connections) in your brain occurs and where the universe in all its marvels, foibles and wonders takes place. I have 100 billion neurons in my brain, encased in a skull, that are able to "move out" and think about the 100 billion stars in a mid-sized galaxy like ours, write about it in this sentence, and ending it with a period that contains 100 billion atoms. That is an image that never fails to blow my mind. You connect in a way that startles you, and your world is bigger. Could someone please write a song about this 100 billion magnitude? There is one already about minutes.

Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "A mind that is stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimension." You are never the same after a creative moment. Witnessing a moment of creativity, of someone else’s or your own, whether seen in a charming origami, an elegant flower arrangement or object design, a delicious hint of curry in an otherwise flat dish, a deep scientific insight into nature, subtle changes in luminescence in a painting that define an entire masterpiece, the syncopating rhythms of a jazz singer, the final lingering notes of a beautiful song that seem to roll out eternity, or the graceful lyrical bend of a carefully crafted sentence, is a sickness with which I hope we are all plagued in abundance. I also hope we never find a cure.

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