From The Mission:
After eating one banana at 10’oclock precisely, she begins furiously drawing on the nearest blank sheet of paper. Her hand moves as if possessed, compulsively and rapidly sketching the same inane subjects from the day before. The irrepressible urge to create results in a complete neglect of her personal hygiene. Later, she gathers her pictures in a neat pile and binge eats an entire box of cookies. This isn’t a starving artist preparing for an opening show. This is Mrs. YCFZ, an 83 yr old patient never notably interested in art, diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia.
Mrs. YCFZ isn’t the first documented case where an urge to create erupted out of brain damage . . . ; yet the explanation for this sudden obsession for producing art baffles scientists. Creativity, from a neuroscientific perspective, is defined as the ability to produce a work that is both original and valuable. The brain part used in this endeavor is the prefrontal cortex (PFC).
. . . .
The PFC has a big job. It is connected with sensory systems involved in perception and receives information about past events and connects them to long-term memory circuits. As part of the limbic system it modulates emotions and motivations programs and performs plans of actions. In other words, “seeing” that art piece in your mind, planning what materials to use and then executing is all due to this little piece of grey matter. It is understandable then, that impairment of the PFC would result in a creative drought. Yet, clinical evidence says it is not so.
. . . .
The artists were not informed of the mental status of Mrs. YCFZ — they were only told to grade the drawings in front of them. Even though her cognitive ability deteriorated over the course of those three years, her creative capacity had not.
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She scored higher from her first to her last drawings; especially in measures of novelty and abstraction.
Link to the rest at The Mission
> She scored higher from her first to her last drawings; especially in measures of novelty and abstraction.
I’ve seen a lot of “art” like that in museums. “Might be a cow, if you added a leg and deleted a few extra eyes.”
“Any draftsman can do representational art. It takes a true creator to express the soul of a scene via abstract art.”
“The studio had it priced at $3,500 so I figured it must be pretty good.”