Dr. Alice Weaver Flaherty is a neurologist

Neurologist

A neurologist is a physician who specializes in neurology, and is trained to investigate, or diagnose and treat neurological disorders.Neurology is the medical specialty related to the human nervous system. The nervous system encompasses the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nerves. A specialist...

 known for her award-winning book about the neural basis of creativity

Creativity

Creativity refers to the phenomenon whereby a person creates something new that has some kind of value. What counts as "new" may be in reference to the individual creator, or to the society or domain within which the novelty occurs...

 titled the Midnight Disease.

She completed her A.B., M.D., internship, residency

Residency (medicine)

Residency is a stage of graduate medical training. A resident physician or resident is a person who has received a medical degree , Podiatric degree , Dental Degree and who practices...

, and fellowship

Fellowship (medicine)

A fellowship is the period of medical training in the United States and Canada that a physician may undertake after completing a specialty training program . During this time , the physician is known as a fellow...

 at Harvard

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

. She also completed a Ph.D. at MIT

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

. She currently works at the Massachusetts General Hospital

Massachusetts General Hospital

Massachusetts General Hospital is a teaching hospital and biomedical research facility in the West End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts...

 and in addition assumes the position as assistant professor of neurology

Neurology

Neurology is a medical specialty dealing with disorders of the nervous system. Specifically, it deals with the diagnosis and treatment of all categories of disease involving the central, peripheral, and autonomic nervous systems, including their coverings, blood vessels, and all effector tissue,...

 at Harvard Medical School

Harvard Medical School

Harvard Medical School is the graduate medical school of Harvard University. It is located in the Longwood Medical Area of the Mission Hill neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts....

.

She writes in various genres, including “scientific papers, humorous essay

Essay

An essay is a piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition...

s, and picture book

Picture book

A picture book combines visual and verbal narratives in a book format, most often aimed at young children. The images in picture books use a range of media such as oil paints, acrylics, watercolor and pencil.Two of the earliest books with something like the format picture books still retain now...

s”. She is head of the MGH Neurology’s Brain Stimulator Unit, where “she uses deep brain stimulators

Deep brain stimulation

Deep brain stimulation is a surgical treatment involving the implantation of a medical device called a brain pacemaker, which sends electrical impulses to specific parts of the brain...

 to treat psychiatric as well as neurological disease

Neurological disorder

A neurological disorder is a disorder of the body's nervous system. Structural, biochemical or electrical abnormalities in the brain, spinal cord, or in the nerves leading to or from them, can result in symptoms such as paralysis, muscle weakness, poor coordination, loss of sensation, seizures,...

. Her research focuses on how our brains represent our bodies, a factor that helps drive suffering in depression, Parkinson’s

Parkinson's disease

Parkinson's disease is a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system...

, and somatoform disorder

Somatoform disorder

In psychology, a somatoform disorder is a mental disorder characterized by physical symptoms that suggest physical illness or injury - symptoms that cannot be explained fully by a general medical condition, direct effect of a substance, or attributable to another mental disorder . The symptoms that...

s.” Her book, The Massachusetts General Hospital Handbook of Neurology is the most "widely used neurology text in its class".

Experience with hypergraphia (the overwhelming urge to write)

After her premature

Premature birth

In humans preterm birth refers to the birth of a baby of less than 37 weeks gestational age. The cause for preterm birth is in many situations elusive and unknown; many factors appear to be associated with the development of preterm birth, making the reduction of preterm birth a challenging...

 twin boys died soon after their birth, Flaherty was full of grief

Grief

Grief is a multi-faceted response to loss, particularly to the loss of someone or something to which a bond was formed. Although conventionally focused on the emotional response to loss, it also has physical, cognitive, behavioral, social, and philosophical dimensions...

. Several days later, however, she “awoke one morning with an overwhelming desire to put everything on her mind on paper”. She claims she could not stop for a period of four months. A similar experience occurred after the birth of her premature twin girls, who fortunately survived. Following the two birth

Birth

Birth is the act or process of bearing or bringing forth offspring. The offspring is brought forth from the mother. The time of human birth is defined as the time at which the fetus comes out of the mother's womb into the world...

s, her abilities to produce creative works have been heightened. Her most famous book “The Midnight Disease” tries to make sense of this phenomenon

Phenomenon

A phenomenon , plural phenomena, is any observable occurrence. Phenomena are often, but not always, understood as 'appearances' or 'experiences'...

.

Journal articles

she has published 26 peer-reviewed journal articles listed in Scopus. The six most highly cited are:

• Graybiel, A.M., Aosaki, T., Flaherty, A.W., Kimura, M. "The basal ganglia and adaptive motor control" (1994) Science, 265 (5180), pp. 1826–1831. Cited 498 times.
• Flaherty, A.W., Graybiel, A.M. "Two input systems for body representations in the primate striatal matrix: Experimental evidence in the squirrel monkey" (1993) Journal of Neuroscience, 13 (3), pp. 1120–1137. Cited 133 times.
• Flaherty, A.W., Graybiel, A.M. "Corticostriatal transformations in the primate somatosensory system. Projections from physiologically mapped body-part representations"

(1991) Journal of Neurophysiology, 66 (4), pp. 1249–1263. Cited 112 times

• Flaherty, A.W., Graybiel, A.M. "Input-output organization of the sensorimotor striatum in the squirrel monkey" (1994) Journal of Neuroscience, 14 (2), pp. 599–610. Cited 97 times.
• O'Gorman, S., Flaherty, W.A., Fishman, G.A., Berson, E.L. "Histopathologic findings in Best's vitelliform macular dystrophy" (1988) Archives of Ophthalmology, 106 (9), pp. 1261–1268. Cited 71 times.
• Flaherty, A.W., Williams, Z.M., Amirnovin, R., Kasper, E., Rauch, S.L., Cosgrove, G.R., Eskandar, E.N." Deep brain stimulation of the anterior internal capsule for the treatment of tourette syndrome: Technical case report" (2005) Neurosurgery, 57 (4 SUPPL.), pp. ONS-403. Cited 56 times.

Books and non-technical articles

• Flaherty, Alice W., and Natalia S. Rost. The Massachusetts General Hospital Handbook of Neurology. Philadelphia: Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2nd ed. 2007. ISBN 9780781751377
  • • Translated into Japanese as Flaherty, Alice W., and Takamichi Hattori. MGH 神経内科ハンドブック / MGH shinkei naika handobukku. Tokyo: Medikaru saiensu intanashonaru, 2001
• Flaherty, Alice W. The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain. Boston, Mass: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. ISBN 9780618230655
  • Review, Publishers Weekly
  • Review, Women's review of books. 22, no. 3, (2004): 11-12
  • Review, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 53, no. 2 (2005): 630-634
  • Review Lancet Neurology 3, no. 9, (2004): 568
  • Review, The American journal of psychiatry. 161, no. 10, (2004): 1937
  • Review, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 48, no. 1 (2005): 148-150
    • German translation as "Die Mitternachtskrankheit : warum Schriftsteller schreiben müssen ; Schreibzwang, Schreibrausch, Schreibblockade und das kreative Gehirn" Berlin : , 2004. ISBN 9783932909399
    • Japanese translation as Flaherty, Alice, and Toshiko Yoshida. 書きたがる脳 : 言語と創造性の科学 / Kakitagaru nō: gengo to sōzōsei no kagaku. Tōkyō: Randamuhausukōdansha, 2006.
• Flaherty, Alice W. 2008. "Interdisciplinary Inspiration". Nature. 451, no. 7176: 246.