G. Frink's

Yes, blogging can be "Good for you", as Jessica Wapner argues in the Scientific American.

Yet I was angered by her strained suggestion that the blogosphere's growth "may be" the fruit of hypergraphia.

Setting out to rebut that sweeping generalization, I read the February Oncologist article which contains some of Wapner's core material, but which does not mention Alice Flaherty, whom Wapner drags in, apparently to justify her lede.

In attempt to be fair to Wapner, I moved on to Robert Birnbaum's interview with Flaherty, the Harvard neuroscientist who wrote The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain.

Flaherty's book is about "hypergraphia -- the overwhelming urge to write ? and its dreaded opposite, writer's block."

Consumed by grief over the deaths of her premature twin sons, Flaherty entered a four-month period in which she was compelled to put her every thought into writing -- a compulsion which reoccured with the birth of her twin girls. And dissatisfied with other explanations for her compulsion, developed her own.

Because I am myself often driven to write about personal experiences, sometimes reinventing them as works of fiction, I was so caught up in Flaherty's scientific work on those compulsions and that I put aside rebuttal of that sweeping generalization.

Unlike those among my peers who shudder at the possibility of a thoroughgoing scientific explanation for their art, I am not repelled by the idea that literature is what Flaherty calls the "product of this disgusting organ with the consistency of toothpaste."

Nor am I persuaded that the creation of literature and other art is inevitably either the product of a disease or of perspective-rattling trauma.

Paradoxically, that does not in my view make the creation of art somehow "normal." Art is itself extraordinary and is almost inevitably the result of extraordinary states of mind. As Flaherty puts it in a Philocetes Center discussion Hypergraphia and Hypographia: 'Diseases' of Written Word, hypergraphia is "similar to what normal writers do, if there is such a thing" (as a "normal" writer).

She also addressed the point at the time of her book's publication when she said:

I think the relation between mental illness and creativity is useful; mental illnesses are often extreme brain states that allow you to see more clearly how the mechanism is working, even in "normal" people who don't have a diagnosis of mental illness. But it would be a dangerous mistake to go from there to pathologizing creativity. It makes more sense to go in the opposite direction and notice that in certain cases mental illness can also bring strengths, and that all of us share traits with the mentally ill.

All of us "share traits with the mentally ill," because all of us are human.

Sharing traits with the mentally ill is "normal,", and requires us to put aside our prejudice against the mentally ill for a great many purposes in addition to the elevated contemplation of great literature.