Wednesday 10 September 2008

When Stroke Inspires Hyper Creativity


This is not a soupy journey into the mind. It is a story about people whose brains were jolted and re-engineered by psychic trauma, leaving them with curious new talents.




"Line after line, all the time it was in rhyme," McHugh said. "Cup of tea, just for me, nice and sweetened, just be neat."



Eventually, his then-wife Jan McHugh handed him a sketch pad.



"And he'd filled a page with these little alien heads," she said. "There was hundreds on the page and every one of them had a different expression."




An Unwelcome Change


The old Tommy McHugh was no creative person or poet. Early in his liveliness, he was wild and hot-tempered. He got in trouble for fighting, stealing and diacetylmorphine addiction.



When he suffered a stroke at 51, it was as if this man world Health Organization once had been processed in and out of prisons had now been processed into a new existence and doctors were no serve in attempting to explicate it.



"It was just unspeakable," Jan McHugh said. "And I was constantly on the earpiece to people, trying to get help. Or an understanding of what was going on. I thought he was ... going insane."



Tommy McHugh was convinced that he had two brains and he confronted his wife by claiming to be Vincent Van Gogh.



"At this point I was getting really scared," she said. "And he aforesaid, 'You just don't know me at all.' And I thought, well, I don't. I don't know you at all, really."



The partner off eventually divorced, but remain friends.










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