Miller Presentation: Art and the Brain

One of the first things Dr. Miller mentioned during his talk was the fact that art is uniquely human, a notion which seemed to resonate with Gary Marcus's perspective on the role of music in society. According to Dr. Miller, art is essentially absent in non-human primates and occurs just before the evolution of civilization and appearance of language, probably representing a fundamental change in the brain. Dr. Miller's comprehensive presentation on the relationship between art and various degenerate diseases brought up a lot of salient points regarding specific deficits and networks in the brain. Dr. Miller highlighted the fact that the right brain is dominantly responsible for visual reproduction whereas the left brain is dominantly responsible for the conceptual aspects of art. I found Fellini's cartoons an interesting application of the material, for they demonstrated a significant loss in the ability for accurate visual reproduction. Another example of Dr. Miller's that I found very intriguing was of Utermohlen, who was a dyslexic Alzhiemer's patient with diminished language function and enhanced artistic ability. Although diminished drawing ability was visible as the Alzheimer's developed, the sadness that was portrayed served to emphasize the internal awareness of loss.

As a biochemistry major, I also found it interesting how Dr. Miller incorporated the fact that with degenerate diseases, misfolding of a protein starts out in one of the circuits and spreads, which reinforces how protein folding is essential to the presence of proper functioning. During the presentation, many neurodegenerative diseases were included which served to further emphasize how various networks can be affected while others remain intact, specifically looking at how artistic ability is impacted. For example, Alzheimer's affects the parietal lobes bilaterally which results in significant deficits in the ability to make precise reproductions, thus patients' art are often visual representations of what they see in terms of features such as color. In contrast, it was interesting to see the opposite in patients with FTD who can develop new artistic skills after the onset of the disease.

Nevertheless, in addition to artistic ability, Dr. Miller also touched on other networks that are affected by neurodegenerative diseases. For example, with semantic dementia, which is a subtype of frontotemporal dementia, symptoms often include marked anomia, where there is not only a loss of the meaning of words, but primarily the loss of nouns. He also discussed other temporal syndromes such as progressive fluent language disorder and progressive non-fluent aphasia.This served to emphasize the fact that various circuits, such as the temporal and posterior circuit are responsible for multiple facets of everyday life.