Logorrhea Definition and Examples after Brain Injury

Logorrhea Definition

The definition of logorrhea is excessive talking or wordiness.  When a paragraph goes on and on and basically saying the same thing over and over again.  This is a very common frontal lobe deficit that many traumatic brain injury survivors suffer from.

Examples of Logorrhea

In our TBI Voices project we interviewed over thirty survivors and talked to them about deficits they have encountered due to their traumatic brain injury.  The best way to explain logorrhea is to give you real life stories of the impairment.

Our first example of logorrhea comes from our interview with Angela. Angela suffered her traumatic brain injury after being broadsided in her car leaving a Wal-mart parking lot on her way to work.  Her injuries resulted in Angela being in a coma and brain injury.  Angela was a very successful loan processor before her accident.  She could have been called an over-achiever by some.  One of the many deficits Angela has encountered is logorrhea.  She explains: “I start talking. Because then I can control what comes out of my mouth most of the time, to be at least be positive. I won’t remember what I said, I never remember what I said, but I have lived a good life, I am still living a great life, enough that I know good things about the world, whatever the conversation is, by shifting the attention from whatever is taking place at the table that is extremely overwhelming for  me, I can take control by talking myself.”  Even as we interview her we can tell that she struggle with this deficit.  To read the entire story of Angela click here.

Our next example of logorrhea comes from the story of Ian.  Ian was in a motorcycle accident that resulted in him suffering a traumatic brain injury.  One of the deficits that Ian has issues with is logorrhea.  His Dad states that you will be having a conversation and out of the blue Ian will start talking about something totally unrelated.  In Ian’s Dads words; ” And he’s changing the subject off on something that didn’t pertain to at all what we were talking about and it’s sometimes hard to bring him back into the, the track. We’re not interested on Bret Favre over in Minneapolis right now but all of a sudden out of the sky he comes up with that conversation which may have been on the news that day.”

Often survivors will be come logorric because of awkwardness in certain situations.  If they are not really sure about the conversation they are in they may take over with talking too much and sometimes about nothing at all.

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Gordon Johnson

Attorney Gordon Johnson is one of the nations leading brain injury advocates. He is Past-Chair of the TBILG, a national group of more than 150 brain injury advocates. He has spoken at numerous brain injury seminars and is the author of some of the most read brain injury web pages on the internet.

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