ART AND MEMORY

“Art in the context of dementia provides a unique window into the cognitive processes of various brain regions and an opportunity for rehabilitation”, this statement ends the opening paragraph to Portraits of Artists an article by Bruce Miller, MD.  The article discusses artist that experience dementia or Alzheimer’s disease are still able to retain the ability to create art.  I found it interesting that in some of the cases with patients that had frontotemporal dementia (FTD) they found that artistic creativity appeared once again even as the disease developed.  When diagnosing a patient with dementia they examine not only their weakness but their strengths as well, in this case we see one of those strengths being an artistic ability. It was found that patients with FTD developed an interest in painting. This was evidence that despite the disease artistic productivity can somehow still increase.  One very amazing case study was with patients that had right parietal strokes were asked to look at a familiar cathedral. The patients were able to identify many things on their right side but completely disregarded their left side, which meant that the parietal lobes frames attention in a selfish manner and that damage to the right parietal lobe affects the ability to identify images on the left side. This case brings about the Visual Hemi-Neglect, or neglect syndrome in which there is a deficit of spatial attention creating problems with telling “where” objects are in space.