Frontal Temporal Patients and Art

Dr. Miller's talk on Visual Creativity with Brain Disease opened a new way to think about neurological damage.  Oliver Sacks mentions that not all brain diseases result in deficit, but some result in excess.  Frontal Temporal Dementia (FTD) patients have various deficits they must face. Some have progressive fluent language disorder and others have semantic dementia, but according to Dr. Miller some of these patients experience an excess as well: creativity.  It seems that as the world language escapes from some of the FTD patients the begin to preoccupy themselves with the visual world.  It is not only people that were artistically gifted before their dementia that display this extra burst of creativity, but people who had never painted a picture in their life before display their emotion through art as well.  In fact the progression of their disease can be seen in their art work.  If the patients produce art that is concrete at the beginning of their onset it tends to become more abstract as their disease progresses.  William Utermohlen was an artist before the onset of his left side parietal degeneration, but when he was diagnosed he began painting portraits of himself.  As the degeneration progressed the portraits become less and less face-like, and the depression portrayed in each portrait increased.  Utermohlen documented his feelings about his disease through his portraits.  In other patients it was noticed that when drawing animals, the further along someone was in their disease the animals became more prototypical because the patients begin to loose recognition of specific anatomy that belongs to each animal.  Another patient became obsessed with couples and would paint them on various object; however, his deficit was in recognizing emotions.  This deficit caused the couples in the paintings to look eery because the faces did not portray emotions, but the patient continued to paint them until his disease progressed so far that he resulted to abstract art. The obsessions of these patients vary greatly, but in many cases it seems that they replace their language deficit with visual compulsiveness.  Even  though not all FTD patients show this excess in creativity, it would be very interesting to see the different types of FTD documented through art work for those that do show this burst.