Can you not spend any talent points in hard mode?

My brother and I recently beat our copies of The Witcher 2, and, being the masochists we are, both decided to up the difficulty and play the other story branch.

He finished before me, and experienced an irritating bug where he was not able to spend talent points after leveling up, and when I started over on hard a day later, I had experienced the same "bug".

Given that it's unlikely for such an egregious bug to happen in exactly the same way on two separate computers, etc., we were wondering if this was because of our choice in difficulty; can you not spend talents on Hard mode? I mean, I know it's supposed to be harder, but no talents at all?.

It turns out that in order to increase the difficulty, the Hard and Insane difficulties prevent you from spending talent points outside of meditation, in order to prevent you from upgrading your character mid-battle to survive.

To upgrade your abilities on Hard and Insane, meditate, then select the Character option. Here, you can assign talent points.