regarding the roots of artistic ability, creativity
LaBocaLoca
having disproportionately high levels of artistic achievement and ability....
By Claudine Chamberlain
ABCNEWS.com
When he signed up for a brief art course at a local park, "Ed" was a
53-year-old car stereo mechanic with a 10th-grade education who had never
before shown an interest in drawing or painting.
He started with the usual -- simple still-life sketches of vases and bridges.
As his technique improved, he progressed to painting portraits of Indians and
stunningly detailed images of churches and haciendas he remembered from
childhood.
Despite this surge of creativity, however, Ed's mind was dying. He started to
have trouble speaking, and lost his job. He grew irritable and developed
bizarre habits, like compulsively searching for money in the streets.
His case, along with those of four other patients described in Tuesday's
edition of the journal Neurology, offers a glimpse of rare and unexpected
talent in the midst of what is otherwise a horrific and debilitating mental
illness.
The Artist's Secret
Studying patients with this mental illness, says lead researcher Dr. Bruce
Miller of the University of California, San Francisco, may help researchers
figure out where and how artistic ability develops in the brain.
"Van Gogh's and Goya's work blossomed in midlife," he writes, "when they
spurned conventional rules of society." Like Miller's patients, both of these
famous painters worked with extraordinary focus and struggled with mental
illness.
Ed and the other patients were eventually diagnosed as having frontotemporal
dementia, a genetically based disease that eats away at the parts of the brain
used for things like speech and language, but preserves the areas responsible
for visual perception. In other words, it could be that deterioration of one
part of the brain allowed another part -- the artistic part -- to flourish.
"Lots of people say we only use 10 percent of the brain, but I think that's a
gross oversimplification," Miller says. "I think what's really happening is
that we have all sorts of systems in our brains, and they may be turning off
other systems that can't be running simultaneously."
So, it's possible that Miller's patients always had artistic impulses that
simply didn't surface until mental illness hit.
Patients' Stories
Frontotemporal dementia (FTD), as its name implies, causes degeneration of the
frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. These are the areas responsible for
personality and speech, among other things. It can run in families and usually
strikes when patients are in their 50s.
It's often misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's, even though the progression follows a
different path. Alzheimer's patients lose their memory first, while the early
stages of FTD may show up as personality changes, social withdrawal or
inappropriate behavior like spitting or making sexual comments.
Among people over 65, an estimated 10 percent have some form of dementia.
Experts think that frontotemporal dementia accounts for 5 to 10 percent of all
dementia cases.
Other artists described in the Neurology article include a mild-mannered
stockbroker whose decade-long artistic spree actually won him a few awards in
local art shows. He ditched his conservative duds in favor of more colorful
clothes. He painted with fevered attention to detail, sometimes taking hours to
complete single lines.
A 51-year-old housewife took painting classes and later produced realistic
rural scenes of rivers, ponds and other images from childhood. One patient quit
her job as a business manager to paint little pictures of Santa Claus on
gourds. Another patient was a 57-year-old former advertising executive who had
quit his job to write a novel. When that didn't work out, he left his family
for dangerous photography excursions to remote areas of Central America.
All of the patients worked on their art for several years before their dementia
took over. But before that happened, doctors and their families could see that
they had started thinking in a whole new way -- a perspective based more on
visual cues than language or social norms.
And that might help brain researchers like Miller and his colleagues unravel
the mystery of where artistic ability comes from.
Copyright 1998 ABCNEWS and Starwave Corporation. All rights reserved. This
material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed in any
form. 10/21/98 3:51 PM
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