A Glimpse of Tommy McHugh's Brain

Tommy’s visual changes are only part of his new world and new creativity. He has greatly increased verbal fluency—he wants to tell you everything, explain everything about the beauty he sees in the universe. He also has a new love of rhymes. Rhyming, like high verbal fluency, are more often seen after temporal lobe changes than after other lesions.

Tommy now memorizes poetry for pleasure. When I visited him last year, one of the few pieces of furniture that hadn’t been broken down to use in his art was a wooden bench – on which he had copied several of Wordsworth’s poems. For several months after his hemorrhage he would spontaneously break into rhyme, and speak in poetry. He has written many poems, which he mails to friends, doctors, newspapers. So his creative drive is not restricted to the visual arts.

New creative drive after a brain injury often goes along with a group of personality characteristics called Geschwind’s temporal lobe personality syndrome. Besides a strong desire to write (or paint) often called hypergraphia, the characteristics include mood fluctuations (very different from the flat disinhibition of frontal lobe injury), increased philosophical or religious interests (it is a rare letter from Tommy that doesn’t talk about universals), pressured speech, and a decreased interest in other strong drives such as sex. Tommy says that his love of making art has turned him into a monk: he has no time for anything else, and has to set an alarm or he will forget to eat.

FIGURE OF BRAIN LOBES ABOUT HERE. Caption: This diagram of the brain’s four lobes also lists distinctive features of Tommy’s personality that both stem from his brain hemorrhage and shape his art.

During her research fellowship, she wrote The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain an award-winning nonfiction book about the way the brain drives creativity. The Washington Post and The San Francisco Chronicle named it one of the best books of 2004.

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