A Glimpse of How Mind Produces Art

A Glimpse of How Mind Produces Art
Brain-damaged artist raises new questions on
elusive relationship between mind and brain
The Boston Globe 1/16/89

By Tom Valeo
Special to the Globe

On October 31, 1973, a blood vessel burst in the left hemishpere of Carol Frankel's brain. She slipped into coma and would have died without a risky operation in which doctors removed clotted blood to relieve pressure on her brain. But when she left the hospital eight months later, the entire right side of her body was paralyzed and she was unable to speak.

The woman, then only 20, went to live with her parents in suburban Chicago. Returning to college was out of the question, so, with nothing to do, she took; her mother's suggestion and signed up for oil painting lessons. It did not look like a promising hobby; Frankel had never displayed any artistic talent, and although right-handed, she would have to paint with her left hand.

Within a few months, however, Frankel was producing pictures so accomplished that her. speech pathologist began to wonder if the brain injury had somehow stimulated her perceptions.

"I knew I couldn't do with my right hand what Carol was doing with her left," said Andrea Gellin Shindler, now a research associate in the neurology department at Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center in Chicago. "I thought that perhaps when she could no longer communicate through speech, she developed this ability to communicate through paint."

There was evidence to support her theory autistic children who lack the ability to speak produce vibrant drawings. Nadia, a profoundly autistic child born in 1967 in England, astounded psychologists with her precocious pencil sketches, but after the age of 9, when she began to speak, Nadia lost interest in drawing. The same thing happened to Frankel; when she recovered some ability to speak, her interest in painting waned.

Eventually, Shindler found a Impossible explanation for Frankel's rapid" development in State University in Long Beach.

According to Edwards, most people who draw produce stereotyped or idealized notions of what something looks like, images generated by the brain's left hemisphere, which psychologists characterize as the logical, problem solving side. Instead of drawing the face of a person sitting nearby, for example, most people create generic features that bear little resemblance to the person nearby. Edwards frustrates this tendency by having her students copy a drawing hung upside down, a tactic that precludes relying on mental stereotypes and forces the brain's more creative right hemisphere to take over.

"The reason for this is unclear,"' Edwards said. "But whatever the explanation, it works."

Changing sides

The effectiveness of Edwards' technique prompted Shindler to wonder if something similar had happened to Frankel. Perhaps, like a student confronted with an upside-down picture, she had been forced by her injury to use her right hemisphere, which contained some dormant artistic talent.

For years, Shindler considered writing a case study about Frankel's blossoming artistic ability, but with research on the brain accelerating so rapidly, she decided instead to invite neurologists, psychologists, artists and specialists from other fields to participate in a symposium. Held last year at the Art Institute of Chicago and co-sponsored by Michael Reese Hospital, it was titled "Art and the Brain" and brought together nearly two dozen speakers who provided tantalizing clues to the mystery of Carol Frankel's artistic talent

One premise put forth early in the symposium shaped all subsequent discussion: Creativity is not a function of the brain; it is a function of the mind, and the mind is a creation of society.

"Children come into the world mindless, but not brainless," said Elliot Eisner, professor of education and art at Stanford University. "Socialization, acculturation and education bring the mind into being. The mind is a cultural achievement."

Creativity in context

If creativity is a product of the mind, psychologists agree, searching for creativity in the brain is as futile as looking for the soul in the body. Creativity exists only in the context of society, which defines and rewards creative activity, said Dr. Howard Gardner, professor of education at Harvard University and co-director of Project Zero, an academic think tank devoted to the study of creativity.

"There can be no such thing as a hermit creator," said Gardner. "Psychologists tend to view Picasso as a solitary genius who created Cubism in isolation. In this view, the artist was born with creativity, and if we knew enough about the brain, we'd know exactly where to look for it. But it's simplistic to try to locate artistic creativity in the brain."

Instead, like all creative people, Picasso functioned within a "domain" - a discipline or craft valued by the society, Gardner said. Also, Picasso was subjected to judgement by the "field" - that collection of critics, teachers and others who recognized that Cubism was an extraordinary breakthrough and defined Picasso as a genius.

This perspective suggests that, for Carol Frankel, brain damage did not produce artistic ability. Rather, her disability caused her to enter a new domain - painting - where she could apply her ferocious determination to master a " new skill. She began to paint well enough to earn praise; in other words, her success probably resulted from motivation and concentration, not from a physical alteration of her brain. In fact, many psychologists believe there is little difference between the brain of a brilliant creator and that of an ordinary person.

"If we're ever able to scan the brain of an artist at work, we're less likely to find anatomical differences than processing differences," said Gardner.

Epilepsy and emotion

But there is one brain disorder that may stimulate artistic production - temporal lobe epilepsy. The temporal lobe, said Dr. David Bear of the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, plays a crucial role in motivation and emotion. The amygdala, an almond-shaped structure within the temporal lobe, seems to act as a modulator between perceptions and the emotional responses to them. But the temporal lobe is extremely susceptible to the "electrical mischief caused by seizures.

"In the epileptic, the amygdala and other structures in the temporal lobe may become overactive, so sensory signals call up strong emotions," Bear said.

Some temporal lobe epileptics, for example, develop hypergraphia - the compulsion to express themselves at length through writing. One person with this syndrome wrote 10,000 pages in a few. weeks. "Removing the amygdala can take that urge away," he said.

Some temporal lobe epileptics. Van Gogh and Dostoyevsky, for example - have highly active amygdalas that send to the prefrontal lobe "messages that the world is suffused with momentous, significant events," Bear said. "This triggers moral, religious and philosophical preoccupations, and the desire to express oneself in truly remarkable ways. There's evidence that St. Paul, Moses and Muhammad were epileptics. Maybe this could lead to transcendent artistic production too."

In Frankel's case, the brain injury caused convulsions, and she remains vulnerable to seizures, said Dr. Nicholas J. Manno, the Rockford, III., neurosurgeon who performed the operation that saved Carol's life. Consequently, he said, her emotions probably have been affected. "My guess is that her emotional response is not always appropriate," he said.

Although temporal lobe epilepsy may stimulate the urge to create, specialists agree that any destruction of brain tissue will probably impair artistic ability. How ever, even after brain damage, many artists swiftly learn to compensate, an indication that brainfunctions are not neatly localized, as psychologists have long believed.

Even speech, long thought to be controlled by a small portion of the left frontal lobe, is much more complex. Computerized brain scans conducted on conscious patients show that, during speech, the portion of the left hemisphere that French surgeon Paul Broca' identified in 1860 as the source of human speech is very active indeed. But the right hemisphere is equally active, said Dr. Elliott D. Ross, professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Texas in Dallas.

The right hemisphere, Ross said, interprets the "melody line" of speech, those inflections that clarify the meaning of words. People who suffer strokes in that region can still speak, but only in a flat, emotionless way, and they cannot detect emotion or irony in the speech of others.

The parallel brain

Research demonstrates that the brain processes information in a parallel, not a linear fashion. Until recently, many psychologists assumed that sensory data passed from one region of the brain to another. An image on the retina, for example, would pass in a linear fashion through regions that distinguish color, form, depth and so on, with the perception becoming more sophisticated as it progressed.

"That view is no longer tenable," said Dr. Antonio Damasio, head of the neurology department at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City. He offered the example of an artist who in 1978 suffered a small stroke in the right visual cortex at the back of the brain, which left him unable to see color in his left visual field. The artist's visual acuity remained as sharp as before, and he could still interpret what he saw. Only his color vision was affected.

"If this can happen," Damasio said, "it is not possible to conceive of sequential processing in the brain. Obviously, the brain farms out work to various regions simultaneously." How the brain re-assembles these parallel operations into a single, unified perception remains a mystery, he added.

But it is the brain's ability to synthesize perceptions that lies at the heart of artistic creativity, said Dr. Jerre Levy, a neuropsychologist at the University of Chicago. That is why she believes that the corpus callosum - the bundle of fibers connecting the two hemispheres - is probably larger in highly talented artists than in other people.

With Carol Frankel, brain damage did not enlarge the corpus callosum, which is genetically determined, and no one claims that the injury created her artistic talent. The most logical conclusion is that the injury caused Frankel to develop abilities she already possessed, abilities nurtured and expressed through art, said Stanford's Eisner.

"The development of the mind depends on what we've been exposed to," he said. "That's why art should be singled out for attention - art is a means for cultivating the mind."