A Woman’s Epilepsy Medication Turned Her Into a Compulsive Poet

By Melissa Dahl - Science of Us

Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Introducing what appears to be the exact opposite of writer’s block: After starting a new medication for epilepsy, a 76-year-old woman was suddenly stricken with an unstoppable urge to write poetry, according to a case study in the journal Neurocase.

She’d never before been especially interested in poetry, but within a few months after she began taking the anti-seizure drug lamotrigine, the woman began pumping out 10 to 15 short poems each day. In addition to the sudden interest in poetry, she also developed “a more general fondness for wordplay, frequently using puns in speech, making humorous word associations, and identifying word patterns in everyday objects such as car license plates,” the study authors report. 

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