Brain Points

Bruce Miller's talk on Visual Creativity in Dementia gave insights into the neural underpinnings of artistic ability.  Miller describes how Frontal Temporal Dementia (FTD) patients often experience enhanced creative abilities as a result of their illness.  Research provides evidence that this is due to the gradual death of circuits in the left anterior brain regions, necessary for planning, inhibition, and conceptual thinking.  Amazingly, this switching off of left anterior regions of the brain seems to encourage right hemisphere regions, the seat of visual perception, to compensate - thus leading to increased artistic ability.

He also covered how patients with Alzheimer's experience a decline in their ability to process the visual environment as the disease progresses and ultimately they loose their ability all together.  Though these patients don't experience any awakening of hidden talents, as often occurs with FTD patients, their art becomes less realistic and more surrealistic. 

I was not particularly surprised by the information in Dr. Miller's talk as we have learned so much about visual processing in 382 but also because I am an artist myself.  To produce good art, one need to first learn techniques.  To use painting as an example, an artist begins by engaging their left anterior brain to analyze their visual scene and learn how to mix paints, control brush strokes, and plan out a composition.  Eventually many of these skills become more or less automatic, allowing creative juices to flow onto the canvas without the artist having to constantly stop and think about what they are doing.  This would obviously stunt the artistic process. 

For good art to be born, the artist first has to have excellent technique (derived via left hemisphere) but then they have to "forget" it by allowing it to reside in non-declarative memory, where it is engaged in creating the art, but on autopilot.  This allows the right brain to come in at full throttle and guide emotions and energies onto the canvas.  In my own experience, I have often struggled to allow the right brain to do its thing . . . it's easy to get caught up in being analytical and in so doing, stop the flow of energy and emotion.  It is my hope that I will improve at letting my art inform my science and my science inform my art because, in my view, neither is complete without the other;  Just like our brain hemispheres need one another in order to create a rich and fulfilling human experience.