What stunts/encourages creativity?
Michaela
[-Scientists have viewed distant galaxies, but until recently they knew
next to nothing about why people sing, paint and write poetry. Alone
among species, we create art as naturally as we breathe and walk. Now,
using powerful tools to view the brain, scientists are making surprising
discoveries. In a four-part series starting today, Brad Evenson explores
recent findings about art and the brain.-]
by?Brad Evenson -- Jancy Chang began losing her mind in tiny
brushstrokes. In the mid-1980s, the San Francisco high school art
teacher noticed she had trouble reading. Soon, she found it difficult to
plan lessons. At first, she hid her problems by getting her teenage son
to help her. But later, words would slip from her grasp and eventually
she could not remember the names of any of her students or control her
classroom. Like a portrait painted in reverse, the familiar likeness of
Jancy Chang was becoming a blank canvas.
Yet at the same time, a strange but exciting image was taking its place.
Two years before retiring in 1995, Ms. Chang abandoned her solitary art
studio, where she painted demure watercolours of Chinese folklore. Paper
and pen in hand, she began sketching people in caf? and at concerts.
The ink drawings were less refined than her earlier work, but more
intriguing. Her personality changed, too. Ordinarily a reserved woman,
Ms. Chang grew uncharacteristically friendly, ignoring social cues and
entering the conversations of strangers.
Suddenly, in 1997, amid a growing inability to speak or read, Ms. Chang
produced some of her wildest and most original paintings. The
constraints of her formal training slipped away. She splashed large
swatches of red, turquoise and purple acrylics on paper.
She painted male nudes with distinctly sexual overtones. One piece, of
two sumo wrestlers locked in struggle, showed an emotional side, as
though in existential conflict for her mind.
In a way, they were.
In 2000, Ms. Chang's family brought her to see Bruce Miller, a
neurologist at the University of California in San Francisco. Dr. Miller
put her through a series of tests, including an MRI scan, and diagnosed
her with frontotemporal dementia, or FTD.
In plain terms, the brain cells between her left eye and ear were dying,
taking away her powers of language, social graces and reasoning. As many
as 400,000 North Americans suffer varying degrees of FTD. In its most
advanced form, dementia strips away the brain's ability to function.
There is no cure.
Ms. Chang's case, described last month in Neurology magazine, raises a
series of questions: Where in the brain does artistic creativity reside?
Can the "damaged" mind give rise to true art?
Few doctors in the world know more about frontotemporal dementia, or the
brief blossom of creativity it can render, than Dr. Miller.
"One of the tragic aspects of it is the beginning of creativity heralds
the onset of disease," he says.
"And as the disease progresses, we go through a period where someone
perfects the artistic skill, so it steadily improves as the disease is
progressing, and then the disease eventually overwhelms the process and
eventually the creativity is gone."
Dr. Miller made the link between dementia and creativity quite
serendipitously in the mid-1990s.
An FTD patient's son mentioned his dad, who had never shown an interest
in art, had taken up painting. Dr. Miller had read a few studies about
Alzheimer's disease, a different form of dementia, and assumed his
patient's work was getting worse, like his language skills and emotional
control. Far from it, the son said -- it was getting better.
"I didn't really believe it, but he sent me a series of paintings over a
10-year period and I saw this incredible blossoming of art rather than
its deterioration," Dr. Miller says.
Dr. Miller now finds himself drawn to galleries, gazing with as much
curiosity as awe.
"I think about the art and what parts of the brain it came from and what
the uniqueness of that artist was, how I enjoy looking at the piece.
It's affected me a lot."
Other doctors have also been surprised by their patients' newfound
creativity.
Dr. Sandra Black, head of neurology at Sunnybrook and Women's College
Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, has an elderly FTD patient who can no
longer speak or understand words, but has taken a fresh interest in
playing the piano.
"Music is a form of expression for her," says Dr. Black. "It's still
remarkable because she actually reads [sheet music]. Yet she can't
understand a single spoken or written word."
Dr. Black finds this curious, because reading musical notes strikes her
as the kind of analytical task the left brain might ordinarily do.
These patients are a distinct minority. When Dr. Miller combed the
records of hundreds of his FTD patients, he discovered the creative
outburst happened most often in those with left-brain damage.
In general, the left hemisphere of the brain controls language, memory
and emotional control, while the right side is dominant in visual and
musical ability. Damage to the left hemisphere may liberate the right
side to express itself.
Dr. Miller began to think of the left side of healthy brains as a bully,
suppressing the creative instincts of the other side.
"I've wondered whether this dominant hemisphere which shapes our
linguistic perceptions of the world may in some ways dampen our visual
ways of thinking, which is, I think, at the core of great art," he says.
Doctors have seen close parallels between FTD patients such as Ms. Chang
and so-called autistic savants, people stricken with deep mental and
social deficits but also mysterious talents. Most people are familiar
with Dustin Hoffman's character, Raymond, in the movie Rain Man, an
autistic savant who could perform staggering feats of arithmetic.
But relatively few know the story of Nadia, a young British autistic
girl who began, at three years of age, to draw sophisticated line
sketches of galloping horses. While most people draw by sketching an
outline first, Nadia would draw a nose, then a tail or hoof, then fill
in the missing portions later, always with faultless composition. The
sketches drew comparisons with those of Rembrandt.
However, when Nadia began learning to speak at age six, she lost her
drawing abilities.
Neurologists were fascinated with Nadia, whose brief period of
creativity in the 1970s took place before the development of high-tech
brain scanning machines. So when Dr. Miller heard about a young San
Francisco autistic boy, Dane Bottino, who had shown similar art skills
in the early 1990s, including a compulsion to draw horses, Dr. Miller
took images of his brain. He found a pattern he was familiar with in
dementia patients: diminished blood flow and nerve firing to the left
side of the brain. Now 15, Dane has recently shown a talent for music
and has been found to have perfect pitch.
But how is the creativity of people with damaged brains to be judged?
Must a person be judged sane and competent to be a genius? Clearly not.
Vincent Van Gogh had a family history of depression, he drank heavily,
he once ate his lead paints in a fruitless effort to kill himself, which
undoubtedly harmed his brain. Yet even while living in an asylum at
Saint-R?y-de-Provence, he produced some of his finest works.
Ironically, while the art world accepts the emotional disturbance of a
Van Gogh, Francisco Goya or Jackson Pollock, it is uncertain how to
embrace work done by people with brain disease, like the great American
abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning.
In the early 1980s, it became obvious de Kooning was suffering from
Alzheimer's disease. He could no longer recognize friends, his eyes
dulled and he shuffled from room to room in his pyjamas.
He was not, however, willing to relinquish his brushes, and continued to
paint in his massive Long Island studio.
Instead of his usual splashes and drips of paint, de Kooning's strokes
now glided across the canvas, eerily calm and oceanic.
Once news of de Kooning's brain disease leaked out, curators and art
dealers began scrutinizing his work for evidence of his decline.
A few pulled paintings from their shows, convinced they were worthless.
Critics greeted the new works with patronizing contempt.
"These spectral, vacuous confections of ribbony paint are among the
saddest things ever made by a once major artist," wrote Robert Hughes,
Time magazine's art critic.
"I think initially there was an awful lot of suspicion and many rumours
that his assistants were making the paintings," says New York art dealer
Klaus Kertess, who has curated three major de Kooning exhibitions.
Kertess says opinions began to shift two years ago when the Museum of
Modern Art in New York staged an exhibition of de Kooning's work from
1987, a time when he could no longer hold a conversation. The
Alzheimer's work is different, some critics say, but it has artistic
merit.
"I think the paintings have a kind of lyricism and openness and grandeur
of scale that de Kooning had never achieved earlier in his work,"
Kertess says.
"So there are merits that these paintings have and evidence of growth
that I think is pretty amazing."
While Alzheimer's destroyed de Kooning's ability to remember people or
places, he had an uncanny visual recall for paintings he'd made decades
earlier.
"In the 1980s, instead of holding up his old paintings to use as visual
cues, de Kooning found a projector in the basement of his studio to
project tiny drawings from the 1960s on to large canvases that were
72-by-84 inches, and he'd use that as the beginning of a painting," says
Kertess.
"And they weren't slavish copies -- it wasn't like he was copying the
1960s, but they were cues to new work."
By 1989, de Kooning reached the point where none of his faculties worked
any more. He still painted, and flashes of brilliance would sometimes
arise, but nothing that would hold a canvas together.
The work of de Kooning, Nadia and other artists with brain damage raises
the possibility that possessing normal language skills might be an
artistic handicap. Perhaps retreating to a silent studio of the mind
helps the creative process.
Dr. Miller suspects it might.
"When someone makes a painting, they're usually not in a verbal mode,"
he notes.
"I think they're rarely speaking. They're probably turning off a lot of
these language functions and thinking in a visual way. And I think maybe
our frontotemporal dementia patients with a progressive language
disorder are in a more permanent and non-linguistic state and that may
in some way enhance their visual perceptions."
Indeed, some scientists believe many healthy people may harbour an inner
Jancy Chang or Dane Bottino struggling to be heard amid the overwhelming
din of speech.
At the forefront of this school is Alan Snyder, director of Australia's
Centre for the Mind. He believes autistic savants and some people with
temporal brain damage can tap directly into their latent abilities.
He believes all people have remarkable unconscious skills, such as math
or drawing, which are blocked by our conscious mind.
To test this theory, Snyder's colleagues at the University of Adelaide
used magnetic stimulation to inhibit the brain activity in the left
frontotemporal lobe of 17 healthy volunteers.
Five of the 17 volunteers in this altered state made remarkable
improvements in their horse drawing and math exercises -- tasks at which
autistic savants excel.
Snyder suggests most people have a genius artist in residence in their
brains, struggling to be heard.
"Buried deep in all our brains are phenomenal abilities, which we lose
for some reason as we develop into 'normal' conceptual creatures,"
Snyder told a New York Times magazine reporter.
"But what if we could awaken them?"
Could the damage of strokes, or Alzheimer's, blunt trauma or
electromagnetism awaken the artist within?
Dr. Miller has no doubts that the work of "damaged" minds such as de
Kooning's or Ms. Chang's is true creativity.
"I think at the core of creativity is asymmetry, it's seeing things in a
way that other people don't," he says.
"And I think that often, when people perceive the world differently than
others, it's because one certain faculty is tuned up and others may
actually be diminished. I think a lot of creative work is seen in people
who are pretty asymmetrical."
http://www.nationalpost.com/national/story.html?id=C37BFDB8-575C-4551-9B
AF-59175119F4A8
Eleonore Beaudoin
few hundred pages, and must still be apealing to as many persons as
possible to sell...which probably explains why I find the
information in this a bit...oh, not obsolete, but not at the fine
point of knwoeldge in that area.
In fact, _Art, Mind and Brain_, by Gradner, published many years
ago, is way more specific about art and the mind/brain, if it itself is
here and there still not with latest findings and discoveries about the
brain, the right side function and the left side's, etc.
I think you might enjoy reading it, Michaela, if such things interest you.
Most particularly the last third of the book that treats more directly of
art and the brain itself, giving examples of various brain dammage cases
(various area of the brain dammaged) and what it gices way too in
knowledge ""loss"" (changes?) and in artistic discoveries.
Chloe
Michaela
(michaelamack...@yahoo.com)
writes: > http://makeashorterlink.com/?S2D822546
--
Michaela
> An article of the kind needs of course be shorter than a book of a
> few hundred pages, and must still be apealing to as many persons as
> possible to sell...which probably explains why I find the
> information in this a bit...oh, not obsolete, but not at the fine
> point of knwoeldge in that area.
LOL. Ironic.
I fully expected crits on how out-of-date or unstate
of the art etc. etc. the article may or may not be.
> In fact, _Art, Mind and Brain_, by Gradner, published many years
> ago, is way more specific about art and the mind/brain, if it itself is
> here and there still not with latest findings and discoveries about the
> brain, the right side function and the left side's, etc.
>
> I think you might enjoy reading it, Michaela, if such things interest you.
They don't interest me much at all. I found I really had
to *concentrate* when I read Goleman, fegodsake.
Has it occured to you that you and I might have gotten
entirely different messages from the piece? It certainly
seems that way to me.
- Michaela
http://memory.ucsf.edu/Patient%20Art/pat_art_changj.html
Eleonore Beaudoin
How revealing...
C
--
Michaela
best you get it sorted.
"Eleonore Beaudoin" <bc...@FreeNet.Carleton.CA> wrote in message
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HumungousFungusAmongUs
so they could get some, e.g flog loads of paintings -> get laid.
OTS
"Michaela" <michaelamack...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
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eerie rodent of unusual size & typing ability
own mother or father, you just can't apprectiate the beauty of it.
WHAT KIND OF FUCKING IDIOTS GET PAID TO WRITE THIS FUCKING BULLSHIT!
(not really a question)
"HumungousFungusAmongUs" <omega...@ntlworld.com> wrote in
news:bneuqs$10lg8t$1...@ID-73971.news.uni-berlin.de:
>> 9B AF-59175119F4A8
eerie rodent of unusual size & typing ability
(In case that was less than obvious.)
"eerie rodent of unusual size & typing ability" <ee...@biteme.com> wrote
in news:Xns941FAC7B5...@68.6.19.6: