A symptom that can be used to cause delight?

Try this link:

Thanks for helping out mrbobowen with the link.

Midnightmoon enjoy the book!

Thanks mrbobowen. :slight_smile:

Just thought contributors to this thread might find this link on the BBC news site yesteday interesting as Tourettes is one of the conditions covered in the Oliver Sacks book in the story which I think was titled ‘Witty Ticcy Ray’. Wonder if a lesion could also set condition this off?

Oops, might help to paste the link!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9714000/9714435.stm

You have to have speakers to hear it biscuit! - Must be catching.

I have met Jess (AKA Tourette Hero) and she is a lovely, highly intelligent, young lady. :slight_smile:

How did you meet her?

I have Tourette’s myself. I have also met Pete Bennet the guy from Big Brother with TS.

and I musn’t forget John Davison from the famous QED programme. Met him a couple of times.

Fascinating stuff. Worked with a colleague with Tourettes years ago in Berlin

Yes TS is certainly fascinating …and bizarre!

It’s also, quite probably, the one condiiton that is so regulalry ridiculed. Yes, it is funny but it is often very painful and soul destroying. Thankfully I don’t have the rare form that includes Coprolalia but I do hate the way the media potrays TS. A different conditon I know and nothing to do with MS but something I feel very strongly about.

You definitely need a sense of humour if you have TS or you will never survive.

Sure you are right about that. What I found fascinating about that audio clip was that if you didnt know, you’d swear that someone else was trying to heckle the interview. Even to the extent that Jess’s conversational intonation betrayed no prior indication of those interjections coming or going. I would have thought it would be far more disruptive to her sentence modulation.

I think Jess is just so used to dealing with her TS and everything that goes with it. She just carries on regardless.

We met at a ‘Ticnic’ in the Park that I arrange every year in Hyde Park for people with TS to get together. Sometimes people have never met another person with TS. Jess would fling her arm in the air and shout things like “You wanna talk about fish?!” I had to quickly assess if it was a vocal tic or if she actually wanted to discuss fish as I had not met ehr before and didn’t know her tics. After a few times you can just phase that sentence out knowing that it’s a tic. I guess it’s a bit like someone with a facial deformity. After a while you don’t see it anymore. You just see the person.

I have just watched ‘The Man Without A Face’ and this is a perfect example. You get used to it.

My own children don’t hear or see my tics anymore unless I am going through a waxing period and the tics are much more frequent or I develop a new tic.

I remember when we were at St George’s hospital in London getting my son DX’d with ADHD. I was quite ‘ticcy’ that day and the three doctors in the room had never met me before so they obviously noticed the tics, I was particularly vocal that day.

When they asked my son if his mum’s tics were worse today than usual he replied “No, mum doesn’t have any tics today”…the room erupted with laughter :slight_smile: It was really quite funny. Bless his cottons.

Thanks for sharing that Midnightmoon - very interesting. Its all on here folks; wondering now if there’s anyone experienced having a ‘phantom limb’ or any of the other neurological conditions described in that book. Already noted in Forum members so far: synathesia, Tourettes, hypersexualism, heightened smell. Perhaps theres something not even metioned!

I just read that chapter of his new book. I wonder why he didnt mention it in his earlier books, afterall he describes the condition in others. I got the impression he didnt realise for a long time that his own difficulties were so far outside the normal range. Really ironic for a neurologist. He can’t even recognise the face of his own secretary outside of context unless she speaks. Seems he also has difficulty recognising his surroundings, often getting lost and sometimes walking past his own office block unable to identify it.