What Can We Learn About Art from People with Neurological Disease?

Abstract

Investigation of people with neurological illnesses has been a central approach to understanding the neurobiology of cognitive systems like language, attention, emotions, and decision-making. Yet such lesion studies had not been applied to neuroaesthetics. In the article under discussion, the author reviewed the extant literature and found that artists were not spared the kind of visual-spatial deficits that others experience from brain damage. Rather, in their artwork, they gave eloquent expression of the nature of their deficits. The author was particularly interested in the paradoxical enhancement of some artists whose work seemed to get better following brain injury, and developed a scale, the Assessment of Art Attributes, by which to assess change in artistic style and content. Neuropsychological studies remain a relatively untapped source of information in probing the biology of aesthetic experiences and artistic production.