The Neurobiology of Painting

"In cognitive neuroscience we’ve had a long tradition of trying to understand how the brain works in the setting of brain damage. You can go back a hundred and fifty years to Broca and Wernicke, when our basic understanding of how language works started with studying brain damaged individuals. As a neurologist, I see this all the time. There are fascinating phenomena that happen with neurological disorders; sometimes, after brain damage, artists’ work ends up appearing more interesting and better liked by critics. That’s not true for everyone but there are enough examples to ask a fundamental question: under what construction of the relationship of art-making and the brain, could improvement possibly happen after brain damage? You don’t ever have a situation where someone has brain damage and their vision is better or their decision-making is better or their language gets better. But here’s this quintessentially human activity that in some people gets better. “Sometimes, after brain damage, artists’ work ends up appearing more interesting and better liked by critics” So, one takes a reverse-engineering approach to ask: why are certain types of behaviour that are predisposed to artworks happen in some people with epilepsy? Why is it that with certain kind of brain damage, artwork changes for the better? It’s another way of looking at how the brain is involved in art-making, as distinct from imaging and other techniques. Yes, I’ve written about this artist a bit: her name is Katherine Sherwood and she is a professor at Berkeley who, when she was in her forties, was an art teacher and a working artist as well. She was teaching a graduate seminar and suffered a left-hemisphere stroke in the middle of class. After that, she was severely aphasic [unable to speak or understand speech] for a while. She eventually recovered and started painting again, but her painting changed dramatically. She feels that her process changed; she used to be very focussed on details and was very cerebral about her artwork. After her stroke she was looser and her imagery changed. Even before her stroke, she was interested in ways in which depictions of the brain and nervous system play out in artwork but after her stroke she got even more interested in that. She started to think about how angiograms—the radiographic images of blood vessels feeding our brain—look like trees, and used that kind of imagery in her work. She’s a good contemporary example of someone whose artwork changed after brain injury and garnered attention."