“People with Tourette’s syndrome can’t stop themselves from making sudden repeated movements or noises, so you might infer that they have an impairment in their mental control processes. On the contrary, according to a new study they actually have greater cognitive control than healthy people, suggesting the cause of their symptoms lies deeper, in their subcortical inhibitory mechanisms.”
They should have conferred with novelist Jonathan Lethem, whose most extraordinary achievement, IMHO, was his portrayal of a petty gangster with Tourette’s syndrome, the main character of Motherless Brooklyn. (Lethem, as far as I know, does not himself have Tourette’s.) He nailed this issue of the dialectic between disinhibition and increased control, and what it does to one’s experience of self in relationship to the world.
Tourette’s and obsessive-compulsive disorder have some epidemiological intersection and some phenomenological similarity, nevertheless they are not exactly the same thing psychiatrically. My only quibble with Lethem’s character is that his Tourette’s has alot of OCD to it.
