psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feel ...

, logorrhea or logorrhoea (from

Ancient Greek Ancient Greek (, ; ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the classical antiquity, ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Greek ...

λόγος ''logos'' "word" and ῥέω ''rheo'' "to flow") is a

communication disorder A communication disorder is any disorder that affects an individual's ability to Speech perception, comprehend, detect, or apply language and speech to engage in dialogue effectively with others. This also encompasses deficiencies in verbal and N ...

that causes excessive wordiness and repetitiveness, which can cause incoherency. Logorrhea is sometimes classified as a

mental illness A mental disorder, also referred to as a mental illness, a mental health condition, or a psychiatric disability, is a behavioral or mental pattern that causes significant distress or impairment of personal functioning. A mental disorder is ...

, though it is more commonly classified as a symptom of mental illness or

brain injury Brain injury (BI) is the destruction or degeneration of brain cells. Brain injuries occur due to a wide range of internal and external factors. In general, brain damage refers to significant, undiscriminating trauma-induced damage. A common ...

. This ailment is often reported as a symptom of

Wernicke's aphasia Wernicke's aphasia, also known as receptive aphasia, sensory aphasia, fluent aphasia, or posterior aphasia, is a type of aphasia in which individuals have difficulty understanding Written language, written and spoken language. Patients with Wern ...

, where damage to the language processing center of the brain creates difficulty in self-centered speech.

Characteristics

Logorrhea is characterized by "rapid, uncontrollable, and incoherent speech". Occasionally, patients with logorrhea may produce speech with normal prosody and a slightly fast speech rate. Other related symptoms include the use of

neologism In linguistics, a neologism (; also known as a coinage) is any newly formed word, term, or phrase that has achieved popular or institutional recognition and is becoming accepted into mainstream language. Most definitively, a word can be considered ...

s (new words without clear derivation, e.g. hipidomateous for hippopotamus), words that bear no apparent meaning, and, in some extreme cases, the creation of new words and

morphosyntactic In linguistics, morphology is the study of words, including the principles by which they are formed, and how they relate to one another within a language. Most approaches to morphology investigate the structure of words in terms of morphemes, wh ...

constructions. From the "stream of unchecked nonsense often under pressure and the lack of self-correction" that the patient may exhibit, and their circumlocution (the ability to talk around missing words) we may conclude that they are unaware of the grammatical errors they are making.

Examples of logorrhea

When a clinician said, "Tell me what you do with a comb", to a patient with mild

, which produces the symptom of logorrhea, the patient responded: In this case, the patient maintained proper grammar and did not exhibit any signs of neologisms. However, the patient did use an overabundance of speech in responding to the clinician, as most people would simply respond, "I use a comb to comb my hair." In a more extreme version of logorrhea

aphasia Aphasia, also known as dysphasia, is an impairment in a person's ability to comprehend or formulate language because of dysfunction in specific brain regions. The major causes are stroke and head trauma; prevalence is hard to determine, but aph ...

, a clinician asked a male patient, also with Wernicke's aphasia, what brought him to the hospital. The patient responded: In this example, the patient's aphasia was much more severe. Not only was this a case of logorrhea, but this included

s (such as "taenz" for "stroke" and "regular time" for "regular bath") and a loss of proper sentence structure.

Causes

Logorrhea has been shown to be associated with traumatic brain injuries in the

frontal lobe The frontal lobe is the largest of the four major lobes of the brain in mammals, and is located at the front of each cerebral hemisphere (in front of the parietal lobe and the temporal lobe). It is parted from the parietal lobe by a Sulcus (neur ...

as well as with

lesion A lesion is any damage or abnormal change in the tissue of an organism, usually caused by injury or diseases. The term ''Lesion'' is derived from the Latin meaning "injury". Lesions may occur in both plants and animals. Types There is no de ...

s in the

thalamus The thalamus (: thalami; from Greek language, Greek Wikt:θάλαμος, θάλαμος, "chamber") is a large mass of gray matter on the lateral wall of the third ventricle forming the wikt:dorsal, dorsal part of the diencephalon (a division of ...

and the ascending reticular inhibitory system and has been associated with

. Logorrhea can also result from a variety of

psychiatric Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of deleterious mental conditions. These include matters related to cognition, perceptions, mood, emotion, and behavior. Initial psychiatric assessment of ...

and

neurological Neurology (from , "string, nerve" and the suffix -logia, "study of") is the branch of medicine dealing with the diagnosis and treatment of all categories of conditions and disease involving the nervous system, which comprises the brain, the s ...

disorders including

tachypsychia In psychology and neuroscience, time perception or chronoception is the subjective experience, or sense, of time, which is measured by someone's own perception of the duration of the indefinite and unfolding of events. The perceived time interval b ...

mania Mania, also known as manic syndrome, is a Psychiatry, psychiatric Abnormality (behavior), behavioral syndrome defined as a state of Abnormality (behavior), abnormally elevated arousal, affect (psychology), affect, and energy level. During a mani ...

hyperactivity Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterised by symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity, impulsivity, and emotional dysregulation that are excessive and pervasive, impairing in multiple ...

catatonia Catatonia is a complex syndrome most commonly seen in people with underlying mood disorders, such as major depressive disorder, or psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia. People with catatonia exhibit abnormal movement and behaviors, wh ...

ADHD Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterised by symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity, impulsivity, and emotional dysregulation that are excessive and pervasive, impairing in multiple ...

and

schizophrenia Schizophrenia () is a mental disorder characterized variously by hallucinations (typically, Auditory hallucination#Schizophrenia, hearing voices), delusions, thought disorder, disorganized thinking and behavior, and Reduced affect display, f ...

Aphasias

Logorrhea is often associated with Wernicke's and other aphasias.

Aphasia Aphasia, also known as dysphasia, is an impairment in a person's ability to comprehend or formulate language because of dysfunction in specific brain regions. The major causes are stroke and head trauma; prevalence is hard to determine, but aph ...

refers to the neurological disruption of language that occurs as a consequence of brain dysfunction. A patient who truly has an aphasia cannot have been diagnosed with any other medical condition that may affect cognition. Logorrhea is a common symptom of Wernicke's aphasia, along with

circumlocution Circumlocution (also called circumduction, circumvolution, periphrasis, kenning, or ambage) is the use of an unnecessarily large number of words to express an idea. It is sometimes necessary in communication (for example, to work around lexical ga ...

paraphasia Paraphasia is a type of language output error commonly associated with aphasia and characterized by the production of unintended syllables, words, or phrases during the effort to speak. Paraphasic errors are most common in patients with fluent for ...

s, and

s. A patient with aphasia may present all of these symptoms at one time.

Treatment

Excessive talking may be a

symptom Signs and symptoms are diagnostic indications of an illness, injury, or condition. Signs are objective and externally observable; symptoms are a person's reported subjective experiences. A sign for example may be a higher or lower temperature ...

of an underlying illness and should be addressed by a medical provider if combined with hyperactivity or symptoms of mental illness, such as hallucinations. Treatment of logorrhea depends on its underlying disorder, if any.

Antipsychotic Antipsychotics, previously known as neuroleptics and major tranquilizers, are a class of Psychiatric medication, psychotropic medication primarily used to manage psychosis (including delusions, hallucinations, paranoia or disordered thought), p ...

s are often used, and

lithium Lithium (from , , ) is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol, symbol Li and atomic number 3. It is a soft, silvery-white alkali metal. Under standard temperature and pressure, standard conditions, it is the least dense metal and the ...

is a common supplement given to manic patients. For patients with lesions of the brain, attempting to correct their errors may upset and anger the patients, since the language center of their brain may not be able to process that what they are saying is incorrect and wordy.

References