h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Hypergraphia - A3800891
Author: Farlander with no K - U206300

Er... short and sweet. There's no need to be hypergraphic in writing about hypergraphia.

Cheers,
Far.

You might consider linking to this: A976638, submitted to PR some time ago, but ending up in the Last Bus Shelter, as did many of this author's 'works'.

"Short and sweet"... yeah right A thoroughly well-researched entry by the look of it

"affiliative"... I can't find reference to this word in any dictionary - online or otherwise. Do you mean 'affiliated'?

"comes from the temporal lobes behind the ears", "the frontal lobe behind the forehead"
Not sure that the site of the lobes needs to be described.

"a frenzied firing of neurons in the central nervous system"
Is this frenzied firing centred in the temporal lobe, or does it occur throughout the CNS, which is what that sentence seems to suggest to me.

"and involve only parts of the brain"
involves

"previous psychiatry episodes"
'psychiatric' I think.

"This may involves the use of anticonvulsant"
'may involve' or 'This involves'

"One 37-year-old woman with Tourette's"
'One 37 year-old woman with Tourette's Syndrome'

"Hook me up to those electrodes, Scotty."

@FM: Er... "You might consider linking to this: A976638, submitted to PR some time ago, but ending up in the Last Bus Shelter, as did many of this author's 'works'" - are you sure you got the right article? 'Cos I noticed that this fellow had only one other work submitted to PR.

@Gosho: Thanks for spotting the errors! I don't know *what* I did to the Tourette's Syndrome thing... last I checked, the name of the condition was in full, and there was a link to another Hootoo article about the condition. Maybe I was hallucinating... or maybe it was because I was doing the editing at four in the morning while the rest of the country was sleeping. One should never do work when one's eyes are half-closed...

"are you sure you got the right article? 'Cos I noticed that this fellow had only one other work submitted to PR. "

Absolutely. This guy submitted loads of this stuff, except under different researcher numbers, as Gosho will bear me out. I think that Gnomon collected them all together under an uberentry called 'Turlingdromes', which has, unfortunately, now been deleted. Have a look at A935822 and A935831 if you don't believe me.

And here's some more from a different author, which also found its way into the Bus Shelter: A2887518.

(They don't pay me enough)

Ah okay thanks, FM. I just wanted to confirm it was the right one before I put a link to it (I thought it strange that the person only had *two* articles, so I thought you might have gotten the article number wrong). Talk about scary articles...

Either it's just me or a fair bit of that was lifted from the National Geographic article on hybergraphia.

@Mr. Dreadful: There's a National Geographic article on hypergraphia? When I was Googling for information, there was no such link to the site. I always list my sources under 'References'; if a source is not there, I didn't get the information from it.

[goes to look up NG site] Nope, there doesn't seem to be such an article there. For that matter, there doesn't seem to be anything on temporal lobe epilepsy either.

I *hope* you're not accusing me of plagiarism!

<>

Not at all, it could just be coincidence... it's just that the NG article (from last months magzine I believe) opens with a very similar paragraph about exactly the same person.

@Mr. Dreadful: Oh, okay. Sorry... I tend to get rather defensive. I was actually going to use my own experience as an opening and use a pseudonym, but given that Edited Guide entries are all supposed to be in the third person I felt guilty about using it and took it out. Since Alice Flaherty talked a great deal about her own experience with hypergraphia in quite a lot of interviews (having just released that book, she's probably the most famous hypergraphic personality around right now) and I couldn't find any other testimonies, I thought I'd tell her story instead as a typical example of hypergraphia in the intro.

It's last month's edition of National Geographic, is it? I'll go check the bookstores for it tomorrow (if they still have it, that is). Thanks.

The cover photo is a bloke with electrodes all over his head.

Farlander - it is possible to include your own experiences in an EG entry: A863345

How does hypergraphia relate to the mad ramblings that were posted to Peer Review a few years back on the subject of archangels:

A976638

The author signed on under about five different names, typed in five different entries on the same lines, submit each to Peer Review and never returned. In each case it almost made sense but not quite. Is this hypergraphia or something else?

I'm uneasy about the links to those unedited entries as examples of hypergraphia. I'm not saying that the author *doesn't* have it - indeed there are reasons to think that (s)he does. However, I'm not sure that it's appropriate an edited guide entry to speculate about the mental health of entries produced by other researchers.

However, If there are examples elsewhere on the web which are *definitely* the product of hypergraphia, it would definitely be worth linking to....

Wow. That's almost as good as timecube.com

You're right, Otto. It's not up to us to judge the mental state of other researchers.

My "Turlingdromes" collection is now restored at A1007993 if anyone wants to look.

You do all know that it's not possible to link to unedited entries from an edited entry, right?

@Otto & Gnomon: Yeah, I guess it wouldn't be ethical to... I'll go remove the links. Thanks.

@Gnomon: It would depend on whether the person were writing frenetically, out of control (especially if the person 'received' visions, or was driven by an insane flow of ideas), or if whatever they wrote about was something they believed in and got frothing at the mouth when their belief was challenged (like people who believe in pseudoscience or disbelieve in evolution, for example). I'd say that in this case it's probably the former (did you see that bit in the article about the Japanese researchers who discovered a right-hemisphere variant of hypergraphia, whereby the patients wrote linguistically correct but semantically bizarre rants?), but I'm no psychiatrist/psychologist, so your guess is as good as mine.

@Gosho: Yeah, I could've done that, but what I really wanted was a third-person story-like description of hypergraphia (I thought a quote right at the beginning would ruin things) - many of my articles have story-like intros leading to the subject. But thanks anyway.

I think that it would be acceptable in this case to link to an unedited entry because (a) the normal rule - that Edited Entries should link to the same in order to ensure consistent quality of information - shouldn't apply here as we are referencing it as an *example* of hypergraphia rather than an authority on it and (b) if a bird looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and eats duckweed then it almost certainly *is* a duck, so this is almost certainly hypergraphia. I can't think of any other cogent explanation...

"It's not up to us to judge the mental state of other researchers."

Oh, rats! Does this mean I've been misbehaving?