The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain by Alice W. Flaherty • Hardcover • Houghton Mifflin; First Edition (January 1, 2004) • 307 Pages Condition: Excellent ————————————- Neurologist Flaherty (Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School) explains the psychological and neuroscientific knowledge about the process of writing for a lay audience. She discusses the temporal lobe's role in "abnormal hypergraphia," an increased desire to write. She then explores psychological and neurological explanations for writer's block. The roles of the cerebral cortex in writing ability, the limbic system in the drive to communication, and the temporal lob in metaphorical thinking are examined in subsequent chapters. ————————————— Reviews "[Flaherty] is the real thing . . . and her writing magically transforms her own tragedies into something strange and whimsical almost, almost funny. — The Washington Post "This is interesting, heated stuff." —- The San Francisco Chronicle "Brilliant . . . [a] precious jewel of a book . . . that sparkles with some fresh insight or intriguing fact on practically every page." —- Seattle Post-Intelligencer