| April 08, 2008
FROM THE NY TIMES:
From 1997 until her death 10 years later, Dr Anne Adams underwent
periodic brain scans that gave her physicians remarkable insights to
the changes in her brain.
“In 2000, she suddenly had a little
trouble finding words,” her husband said. “Although she was gifted in
mathematics, she could no longer add single digit numbers. She was
aware of what was happening to her. She would stamp her foot in
frustration.”
By then, the circuits in Dr. Adams’s brain had
reorganized. Her left frontal language areas showed atrophy. Meanwhile,
areas in the back of her brain on the right side, devoted to visual and
spatial processing, appeared to have thickened.
When artists
suffer damage to the right posterior brain, they lose the ability to be
creative, Dr. Miller said. Dr. Adams’s story is the opposite. Her case
and others suggest that artists in general exhibit more right posterior
brain dominance. In a healthy brain, these areas help integrate
multisensory perception. Colors, sounds, touch and space are
intertwined in novel ways. But these posterior regions are usually
inhibited by the dominant frontal cortex, he said. When they are
released, creativity emerges.
Dr. Miller has witnessed FTD
patients become gifted in landscape design, piano playing, painting and
other creative arts as their disease progressed.
Dr. Adams
continued to paint until 2004, when she could no longer hold a brush.
Her art, including “An ABC Book of Invertebrates,” a rendering of the
mathematical ratio pi, an image of a migraine aura and other works, is at two Web sites: members.shaw.ca/adms and memory.ucsf.edu/Art/gallery.htm.
Link: A Disease That Allowed Torrents of Creativity
Tags: creativity and, the brain
Topic: Fine Art
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