Well, chickens, since we have a whole lot of artistic folks runnin' round our blogger neighborhood, I thought mebbe we could take a look at a story from the New Yawk Times that a friend left on the front porch early this mornin'.
Looky at this paintin' of the mathematical value of Pi.
It were done by a lady scientist/ mathematician, Anne Adams, after her frontal lobe were dinged up by a disease...
Seems thar's a rare disease that takes away yore speakin' ability but gives ya' amazin artistic ability as a compensation. Called Pick's disease, it is a rare form of frototemporal dementia. More common in women than men. It can occur in people as young as 20, but usually begins between ages 40 and 60. The average age of onset is 54.
The historians think that "Bolero" was composed when Ravel was beginning to exhibit the same signs of Pick's:
"showing signs of his illness with spelling errors in musical scores and letters.
“Bolero” alternates between two main melodic themes, repeating the pair eight times over 340 bars with increasing volume and layers of instruments. At the same time, the score holds methodically to two simple, alternating staccato bass lines.
“ ‘Bolero’ is an exercise in compulsivity, structure and perseveration,” Dr. Miller said. It builds without a key change until the 326th bar. Then it accelerates into a collapsing finale."
This is how Dr. Adams painted a migraine:
This is how the docs describe here case:
Later paintings, achieved when AA was nearly mute, moved towards increasing photographic realism, perhaps because visual representations came to dominate AA's mental landscape during this phase of her illness. Neuroimaging analyses revealed that, despite severe degeneration of left inferior frontal-insular, temporal and striatal regions, AA showed increased grey matter volume and hyperperfusion in right posterior neocortical areas implicated in heteromodal and polysensory integration. The findings suggest that structural and functional enhancements in non-dominant posterior neocortex may give rise to specific forms of visual creativity that can be liberated by dominant inferior frontal cortex injury.
Ain't humans amazin' creatures? Next time I meet a person whose labeled wif' dementia, I'se gonna git 'em some paper and crayons and see what they wanna "say."
