Sensory Experiences of Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome

Tourette Syndrome: The Self Under Siege

“…The end of a Tourette syndrome action is the 'feel' at the terminal site of the movement, a feel that is frequently accompanied by a fleeting and incomplete sense of relief. 46 This description is wholly congruent with those of others patients with Tourette syndrome: ''A need to tic is an intense feeling that unless I tic or twitch I feel as if I am going to burst. Unless I can physically tic, all of my mental thoughts center on ticking until I am able to let it out.…”

The Neural Circuits That Generate Tics in Tourette's Syndrome

“…Differences in neural activity between spontaneous and voluntary tics could derive from any of these three sources. Given the intense sensory and emotional salience of the premonitory urge in the subjective experience of Tourette patients (35,36), however, the differences in activity that we detected in primarily sensory and emotional pathways seem most likely to derive from intense sensory and emotional experiences associated with premonitory urges in the Tourette group. Therefore, we suspect that greater activity in somatosensory cortices likely represented the sensory features of those urges, whereas greater activity in the amygdala/hippocampus complex likely represented either the emotional discomfort associated with the urges before the tic or the relief experienced following the tic.…”

An Investigation of Tic Suppression and the Rebound Effect in Tourette’s Disorder

“…Although strong evidence of a biological component exists (Houlihan & Hofschulte, 1993;King & Ollendick, 1984;Robertson, 1989), the expression of tics is also influenced by various environmental factors. Contrary to a common misperception that tics are entirely involuntary, tics are, to varying degrees, under voluntary control and may be temporarily suppressed for minutes or hours (Bliss, 1980;Pray, Kramer, & Lindskog, 1986).…”