Epilepsy gives woman compulsion to write poems

Shall I compare thee to... well, no one actually. A 76-year-old woman has developed an incredibly rare disorder – she has the compulsive urge to write poetry. Her brain is now being studied by scientists who want to understand more about the neurological basis for creativity, NewScientist reports.

In 2013, the woman arrived at a UK hospital complaining of memory problems and a tendency to lose her way in familiar locations. For the previous two years, she had experienced occasional seizures.

She was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy and treated with the drug lamotrigine, which stopped her seizures. However, as they receded, a strange behaviour took hold. She began to compulsively write poetry – something she hadn't shown any interest in previously.

Suddenly, the woman was writing 10 to 15 poems a day, becoming annoyed if she was disrupted. Her work rhymed but the content was banal if a touch wistful – a style her husband described as doggerel (see "Unstoppable creativity"). About six months after her seizures stopped, the desire to write became less strong, although it still persists to some extent.

Doctors call the intense desire to write hypergraphia. It typically occurs alongside schizophrenia and an individual's output is usually rambling and disorganised. "It was highly unusual to see such highly structured and creative hypergraphia without any of the other behavioural disturbances," says the woman's neurologist, Jason Warren at University College London.

So what was going on? Warren's team speculates that chronic seizures may lead to a reorganisation of circuitry in the brain, which in this case linked language systems with those that generate emotional responses and a sense of reward, explaining her compulsiveness. These circuits are relatively close to each other in the temporal lobes of the brain. "Perhaps these reorganised circuits were dormant while the seizures were occurring," says Warren. "When they went away, those circuits came back online and the new behaviour emerged."

Previous reports have described various behavioural changes emerging in people as their seizures recede, and Warren's group has worked with another person who developed a craving for music. However, the phenomena remain poorly understood. "Ultimately, unravelling the brain mechanisms involved may require functional imaging techniques such as fMRI," he says.

There's also the possibility that the neural effects triggered by taking lamotrigine may have interacted with the neural changes caused by the woman's seizures, predisposing specific circuits to reorganise themselves in her brain.

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