According to sacks what is the grandma moses phenomenon

Gengarelly has curated, individually or with his students, over 30 exhibitions. He has written and published on a variety of subjects most noteworthy are articles for the Folk Art Messenger and publications on American poster art, Maurice Prendergast and American landscape painting. Awakenings , his book about a group of patients who had survived the great encephalitis lethargica epidemic of the early twentieth century, inspired the Academy Award-nominated feature film starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.

It is wheelchair accessible. Admission is never charged for younger students, museum members, or to visit the museum shop. She's an inspiration. She did start playing young, but she had to leave it all behind until she'd reached her 60s. Re: Grandma Moses' phenomenon - Any personal Experiences Post by granadina » Thu Aug 07, am There have been stories of people developing Artistic abilities following a Brain stroke.

Or , of people whose Art has changed in character as a result of a stroke. In later years , our Social , Psychological and Neurological inhibitions may tend to relax , for one reason or another , allowing a Creativity to manifest. She was a scientist who had a stroke and she explains what she felt when she had a stroke. It is 18 minutes long but I highly recommend taking the time to listen.

Here is an interesting clip of an American surgeon , who after being struck by lightning , and suffering cardiac arrest , developed an ' insatiable passion ' for Piano.

Even began composing music. Re: Grandma Moses' phenomenon - Any personal Experiences Post by dory » Fri Aug 08, pm Seriously, music, especially playing classical music or classical style as opposed, say, to jazz which uses a lot of improvisation uses a whole variety of brain skills-- not all of them right brained--I think, not being an expert on brain structure.

Playing an instrument takes a LOT of muscular control and precision. Not having done anything more athletic than walking canoeing or a low-skilled aerobics class in my life, I was stunned as an older returning guitar student that I had to learn a whole new type of learning, and it has been fun, but not easy and not free form creative.

They were responding to a very specific kind of experience: being black in the South. They were trying to make sense of this, to. In most ways, for me, being a curator for.

American art, one that reflects who we are as a society. Aldo Piacenza , Untitled Milan Cathedral , c. This layer of cultural exchange promises to enrich the conversation around how Chicago became home to an exceptional array of independent artists who were embraced by artists, educators, curators, dealers, collectors and appreciators. Driehaus Foundation. Joseph E. Yoakum American, Japvo peak in Himalaya Range, February 5, Colored pencil on paper, 19 x Left: Mr.

Imagination American, Women of Somalia, circa Bottle caps, whisk brooms, wood putty, paint, paint brushes, buttons, shells, 90 x 12 x 10 in.

Collection of Cleo F. Right: Mr. Untitled Totem , n. Composite stone and found objects, 80 x 32 x 30 in. Wolfson, Intuit recently received two Michel Nedjar paintings, one from Kiyoko Lerner and one from Judy Saslow, that have been accessed into its collection. Intuit appreciates these generous gifts and other recent additions to its collection.

Born in Paris, France, to Jewish Algerian and Polish parents in , Michel Nedjar was aware of the physical and mental devastation that the Holocaust wrought on his family from a very young age.

Among the few family members that were not killed during the war were two aunts, who were both survivors of Auschwitz. He began sewing doll clothes for his sisters as a young boy and, unable to buy his own because of the prevailing gender norms, learned to construct his own dolls from scrap cloth and old doll parts.

Michel Nedjar French, b. Untitled, n. The patient, an architect who had frequently painted, had a year history of Parkinson's disease treated with dopaminergic medication. On account of severe motor and mood fluctuations, deep brain stimulation of the dorsal border zone of the subthalamic nucleus was instituted.

The fluctuations disappeared, and his mood remained constantly elevated. His wife reported he had been quite prolific, concentrating exclusively on female acts, their house being full of these [ sic ]. Not only was he more creative, but his topics and style had obviously changed as he had never painted nudes before.

Neither he nor his wife reported hypersexual behaviour since surgery nor any other behavioural changes. Pictures painted by a patient with Parkinson's disease treated with deep brain stimulation. Left , representative painting before deep brain stimulation; right , painting 3 months after electrode insertion and slight reduction in dopaminergic dosage.

The change in nature and style of painting is striking. From Witt et al. Do the sometimes impressive or even outstanding pictures produced by the autistic individual or savant, the Outsider Artist, and those with schizophrenia or other psychiatric disorder contribute to an understanding of how the brain functions or malfunctions?

The literature on art undertaken by these individuals is enormous, but for several reasons it is difficult to reach definitive answers. Furthermore, the boundary between normal and abnormal individuals may sometimes be difficult if not impossible to define. Amidst these uncertainties, and recognizing that considering these disorders together risks unwarranted simplification, a few aspects are clear.

In the case of autism for review, see Treffert, , there are several well-described examples of art that has been produced by even very young autistics. Although not the first such patient, the most famous, described in Lorna Selfe's classic account, was Nadia, the child who from the age of 3.

The unusual features of her obsessional drawings have been extensively discussed Chatterjee, , , including her ability to achieve mental rotations of 2D representations, yet there was no creativity or originality Zaidel, , and as she grew older and her extremely limited language skills developed, so her drawings became more conventional. Hou et al. Drawing created before the age of 4 years by the autistic child, Nadia.

Further examples of autistic artists and their work, and the relationship of autistic to Outsider Art, have been considered, among others, by Cardinal and Maclagan Acknowledging that some artistic output of autistics appears strange, strangeness of art has also been considered a defining aspect of Outsider Art and Art Brut, and has been related too to art of the psychotic. Thus, apart from the creative drive often amounting to obsession, it does not appear to this writer that there are definitive features of their sometimes spectacular art that are diagnostic or even indicative of any specific underlying disorder or trait, or of specific neural mechanisms that might be associated with or revealed by the artistry.

Exemplified by the precociousness of the autistic artist, however, the context in which the picture is created may be all important, and this aspect is discussed below. Recently, Thomas et al. A patient who developed obsessional painting output after a probable encephalitic illness was described by Sacks Although thought possibly attributable to temporal lobe epilepsy, the absence of any investigations makes that diagnosis entirely speculative.

In contrast, Finkelstein et al. An example of his drawing, showing remarkable skill particularly since it was made during an attack, is shown in Fig. A picture drawn during an episode of transient cognitive impairment experienced during the patient's epileptic seizure.

From Finkelstein et al. Numerous examples of visual disturbances experienced both during the migraine attack and interictally have been reproduced in a definitive account of the subject Podoll and Robinson, , and much online material too has been posted by hundreds of those with migraine Podoll, For some migraineurs an attack prevents any creativity, but for others an attack is the inspiration to paint during the migraine, and while most pictures are created by lay migraineurs, some have been painted by professional artists.

The pictures, often incorporating features such as scotomas and fortification spectra, provide evidence of the variety of the various visual and perceptual disturbances. However, only on the rare occasions when scientists have deliberately illustrated the visual disturbances during their migraine attacks have illustrations contributed to clarifying some of the mechanisms subserving migraine, notably the visual aura Schott, Therefore, migraine is of importance in the context of artistic creativity being an intermittent disorder that can be a cause of inspiration.

That some patients are creative during their attack suggests a need, perhaps a compulsion, to depict the experience. It is necessarily a subjective matter as to whether the art produced during an attack is enhanced by the disorder, but for some migraineurs the nature of their pictures is strongly influenced by their hallucinatory visual disturbances, a phenomenon also observed in many of the conditions discussed earlier, as well as the likely dementia with Lewy bodies suffered by the accomplished artist Mervyn Peake Sahlas, Bogousslavsky has noted that traumatic brain damage sustained during World War I resulted in emergent painting by the poet Apollinaire following a right-sided anterolateral head wound, and in changes in Braque's cubist style of painting after he had been trephined Bogousslavsky, Pictures created spontaneously by a patient with brain disease are rarely envisaged as important tools for investigating their malfunctioning brain.

Viewing any individual picture by a patient with brain dysfunction rarely says much about that dysfunction. However, the context in which a picture is created, or evidence from a sequence of pictures—sometimes just comprising two—can provide some objectivity when considering the phenomenon of enhanced artistry, and both aspects apply particularly to emergent artistry.

Contrasting with viewing fine art, in which the context of its creation may be of interest, unknown or irrelevant, the context in which artistic output occurs in the presence of neurological disease can sometimes suggest its pathological basis.

Thus, it is the atypical or uncharacteristic context or circumstances in which the picture is created that is relevant. For example, for an artist to suddenly start to create wall paintings so large as to fill up whole rooms Lythgoe et al. In another sphere, for a child of 3 years to start exceptionally skilful drawing is a highly atypical circumstance from a pedagogical and cultural perspective; very young children do not normally exhibit the striking artistic capabilities seen in rare autistic savants.

Rarely, even doodles can suggest brain dysfunction Schott, For instance, compared with the everyday, normal doodler, Dostoevsky's numerous, often bizarre doodles littered throughout much of his handwritten texts could be considered a manifestation of hypergraphia and his presumed temporal epilepsy; the frequency with which they appeared suggests compulsiveness, a phenomenon that is considered next.

Also striking is that the urge to create often seems to develop early during the illness, and may be the first element of creativity; for example, two of the patients described by Miller et al. Creative compulsiveness is neither confined to visual artistic output, nor to any specific disease, and the phenomenon in various forms is well described in several neurological disorders ranging from temporal lobe epilepsy to Parkinson's disease. Whether those with an artistic background are more susceptible to compulsive artistry is discussed below, but also of note is that another theoretically important susceptibility factor, the patient's previous psychological background, is rarely reported, although a patient with FTLD and previous bipolar disorder has been described Liu et al.

Because of the disparate underlying disorders, the compulsion cannot be attributed to any specific disease or focal lesion, but the basis may include disruption of frontotemporal-limbic-subcortical circuitry for discussion and references, see Rosso et al. Perhaps a contributory factor in the artistic compulsion seen in some patients is the exhilaration occasionally described. Although in the face of brain disease many patients show withdrawal, depressive and other negative features, occasionally marked positive sensory and emotional features are reported by these artistic patients.

In the context of autism, Baron-Cohen et al. Important evidence suggesting brain dysfunction is when artistic output unexpectedly changes. Necessarily only recognized in retrospect, changes are revealed by means of a sequence of pictures, and frequent references to such changes have been made above. Changes presumably reflect the origin and nature of the causative cerebral disturbance, and emergent artistic production—when pictures arise unheralded from nothing—is the most dramatic and unexpected sequential change that occurs, but sequences often reveal more subtle changes, and a few examples relevant to enhanced artistry are commented on below.

Changes in style or form have often been observed. For instance, changes from the abstract to the realistic have been described, most notably the sequence of pictures painted by Anne Adams discussed earlier, in which transmodal creativity and abstract pictures changed to more symmetrical images, and then gradually to realistic images as her dementing illness progressed Seeley et al.

This eventual realism is in concordance with the realistic creations shown by others with FTLD and emergent artistry Miller et al. However, the reverse too has been noted, with changes from a figurative and realistic to an abstract style, examples including patients with progressive aphasia associated with frontotemporal dementia Mell et al.

A particularly striking example revealing the power of sequential pictures is the progressive menace evident in the faces portrayed in Fig. A Picture made many years before his illness; B and C pictures made in the first 2 years of his dementia and D at least 3 years into his disease. Changes in colour used by different artists have also been observed. For example, amongst patients with dementia, brown and yellow became characteristic for one patient Patient 2 in Miller et al.

All these artistic changes become evident, or at least documented, only after the patient's disease had emerged. While sequential changes can prove an indicator of possibly changing brain function, change in artistry has rarely alerted viewers or the artist that brain disease is occurring, and it is at present not possible to interpret any specific change in isolation. Furthermore, neither atypical context nor sequential changes necessarily indicate brain dysfunction , and over-interpretation needs to be avoided.

Two remarkably contrasting patients reported above are pertinent to the phenomenon of synaesthesia and artistic creativity. The patient described in Seeley et al. For elements without a concrete intermodal representation, she performed more abstract transformations e. For still other elements, she applied her own aesthetic preferences to create novel transmodal schemes e. Strikingly, however, she did not experience synaesthesias. Her remarkable transmodal creativity, an example of creative cognition Mulvenna, , was seemingly a manifestation of her intellect and artistic skill, together with her drive and obsession, which might have been mediated by uninhibited right cortical structures and their connections see below.

This patient's symptoms represent acquired synaesthesia, the causative site and cause being focal ischaemic damage mainly affecting the posterior third of the left insular cortex, which recalls another patient with acquired synaesthesia after thalamic stroke Beauchamp and Ro, Various possible mechanisms have been proposed, including excess connectivity or disinhibited feedback as a consequence of plasticity or axonal sprouting Armel and Ramachandran, ; Hubbard and Ramachandran, ; Beauchamp and Ro, But, in addition, the possible link between synaesthesia and creativity is intriguing, since there is evidence of higher levels of creativity in normal synaesthetes Mulvenna et al.

Furthermore, recalling that Patient MB's infarct affected the left hemisphere, in at least some instances of synaesthesia the posterior parietal cortex emerges as a region of particular importance Esterman et al.

Considering the numerous conditions in which enhanced, unexpectedly preserved or emergent artistic creativity occurs, it is evident that such artistry is neither disease-specific, nor culturally based: emergent artistry has been observed in FTLD in uneducated Japanese individuals Midorikawa et al.

Furthermore, the presumed causative underlying conditions can be acute or chronic, diffuse or circumscribed, and present from early childhood to late age.