Is it Tommy’s frontal lobe changes that drive his art? That would fit with another popular myth about art in the brain, that the frontal lobes somehow repress it. That is sometimes the excuse that alcoholic artists give for drinking, that the alcohol suppresses their frontal lobes and allows them to work outside the box.
Several lines of modern research argue that these views are wrong. Functional brain scans show that creative people use their frontal lobes more than uncreative people do. The more artists use alcohol or other sedatives, it turns out, the less creative they become. Artists are at risk for alcoholism just as they are at risk for depression, but those conditions hurt, rather than help, their art.
All colors are more vivid for Tommy since his brain hemorrhage, and he describes seeing new colors that he can’t describe. Color perception is typically a function of the occipital lobe. Face perception, by contrast, is a temporal lobe function, and that has changed in Tommy too. Now he sees faces in everything. At first, clouds, tree bark, folds in people’s clothes, all appeared to form eyes, noses, mouths. Tommy’s art still shows this proliferation of faces – they morph out of streaks of paint, the rock he carves, and even out of each other.
During her research fellowship, she wrote The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain an award-winning nonfiction book about the way the brain drives creativity. The Washington Post and The San Francisco Chronicle named it one of the best books of 2004.
To purchase this fantastic book please click on the Amazon link bellow
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