Doctors have noted that some dementia patients suddenly take up painting, welding, wood carving — even as their memory-loss symptoms worsen. A new UCSF study may have uncovered what’s behind this surge in creativity. One of the study’s authors is Dr. Bruce Miller, a behavioral neurologist and founding director of the Global Brain Health Institute at UCSF.
The study focused on frontotemporal dementia, but many forms of the illness exist. That includes a behavioral variant, which typically impacts the right side of the brain and can lead to “profound behavioral disturbances, disinhibition, over-eating, and loss of empathy for others,” Miller explains.
Another is called progressive aphasia, which affects the left side of the brain, and is represented in the study: “They cause a progressive deterioration in language. … This visual creativity was over-represented in this group of people in whom frontotemporal dementia attacks the language circuits in the brain.”
He explains that people with progressive aphasias may have words well formed in their heads but struggle to vocalize or write them down. Others no longer understand a word’s meaning. However, they gain visual abilities.
“It's a principle of nerve regeneration. … When one circuit on one side of the brain starts to diminish in its function, other circuits chime in. … So in this case, the language … is lost, but these people become … intensely preoccupied with the visual world around them. And some of them actually begin to show incredible visual creativity.”
Miller makes sure to clarify that as people age, it’s not necessarily a sign of dementia when they have more trouble finding the right words, or they’re searching for names they forgot. Brain circuitry constantly reshapes with age, he emphasizes.
“The unbelievable plasticity of the brain that allowed elders — who had never painted before — to suddenly become rather brilliant artists, it's really, I think, a beautiful story. … It humanizes these illnesses in a way that I never expected.”