Neuropsychological Aspects of Artistic Creativity

Most traditional neuropsychological work concerns aspects of cognition in the most ordinary sense: how the average person perceives and represents the world, and how she acts in response to what is perceived or felt. The extraordinary perception and action of artists has been a subject of fascination for some neuropsychologists at least since Alajouanine, but little systematic work has been done recently. The present study attempts a review of the problem based on a number of published cases of famous artists, including especially painters and poets. The basis for interpretation is one of the most recurrent problems in neuropsychology, the asymmetry of the cerebral hemispheres. There have been many clinical observations that a right-hemisphere lesion is very disruptive of creative work in general; it is less well known, but has been documented, that left-hemisphere lesions can seem to actually liberate artistic potential. The present study re-examines the patients described by Alajouanine and Luria et al., then takes up a series of other documented cases: the famous novelist Dostoevsky, who suffered from epilepsy; the painters Vrubel, Munk, and Zhukovsky, and finally Alexander Pushkin, who liked to draw profiles of various people, including himself, and whose mental problems are well documented.