Artists in Bloom
Enhancing Creativity with Dopamine
Sometimes I think about what I learned from all of the money that my parents spent during my childhood on drawing lessons, painting lessons, calligraphy lessons, and woodcut lessons. I learned a frustrating life lesson. I am a terrible visual artist.
I will never be a Claude Manet or an Albrecht Durer or even a William Dunlap or John Alexander, two of my favorite Southern painters. I like Dunlap’s Walker Hounds and Alexander’s political paintings - both fine allegorical painters.
I tried abstract impressionism, but my wooden paint palette looks better than anything that I painted using it. I am not another Jackson Pollock, either.
Anyway, I inherited the desire without the talent, unlike my sister.
The earliest memories that I have of my sister is of her painting in her bedroom - a corner room in the small house that my dad had built by hand with help from my mother and their good friend Manning. This memory was from the early 1970’s when geometric abstracts and psychedelics were in vogue and I remember her in hues of turquoise, orange sherbet and yellow meringue. She married a talented artist after college and they went on to create their best work - two artistically talented children. They also painted, sculpted, and built gardens while playing the music of a full life.
Sliding over to my branch of the family tree, my son appears to have inherited my lack of visual artistic talent even though I encouraged him with a variety of lessons. I even sent him to an encouraging private school where they encouraged creativity to the point that ended the school year with an encouraging art show. Each class was encouraged to pick a different subject to paint for the show where the parents were “encouraged” to buy their child’s painting. To paraphrase Scrooge, sometimes I felt the show a poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every year, but I am glad that I still have them. How encouraging!
In an effort to expand his appreciation of the visual arts we have visited various galleries including the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. The gallery visit happened during a trip to the Shenandoah Valley the winter after my DBS surgery and just before COVID hit. We stayed in Charlottesville and took the train into D.C. for a quick tour of the Capitol.
After running the metal detector gauntlet, we finally made it into the National Gallery. Once inside, we went into the first exhibition and were immediately hollered at by the security guards for standing too close to the paintings. Seems that there is an unpublished 36 inch rule that contradicts their published 24 inch rule. Maybe they should post “patrons may look but not too closely” sign.” Good advice for anything going on in D.C.
As an aside, if you are considering DBS surgery, touring D.C. as a person with brain implants can be hazardous due to the number of metal detectors and screeners that are everywhere. Each time I walked through one, I thought about the 1980’s anti-drug commercial showing an egg in a frying pan “this is your brain; this is your brain on drugs.”
As we walked around, I thought back to the last time that I had visited the National Gallery some 40 years earlier. In those days, my high school required the senior class to take a week long trip to D.C. I was so taken in by the artwork that I became separated from the group and found myself very much alone with not even a guard in sight to holler at me. This was in 1984 when we still enjoyed a lot more spatial freedom than we do now.
As impressive as the exhibits were in D.C., they did not have any as unique as the Parkinson’s, Creativity Dopamine. Encounters with 13 artists exhibit at the Grenoble Museum of Medical Science in France.
I heard about the exhibition of artists with Parkinson’s in an interview with Dr. Bastiaan Bloem, a Movement Disorder Specialist and professor of Neurology at Radboud University in the Netherlands. Though the video is about how to end Parkinson’s, he mentions the exhibition in an article that he co-authored in American Scientist entitled What Parkinson’s Reveals About the Artistic Streak.
Knowing that in all probability, a cure won’t be found in my lifetime, I was much more interested in reading what Dr. Bloem had to say about the role of dopamine in the creative process.
A few of my thoughts along with points from the article:
Dopamine replacement medications such as agonists and L-dopa go beyond just being the catalyst to create visual art. This is good news for those of us who cannot draw a straight line.
Although most case studies have focused on visual art, similar interests in other forms of creative expression, such as music or poetry, have also been reported.
Being artistically creative does not mean that artists are less likely to develop Parkinson’s. However, being artistically creative may decrease symptoms early on in the diagnosis.
They found that having had an artistic job earlier in life was not predictive of the onset of Parkinson’s. However, people who held artistic jobs later in life and were then diagnosed with Parkinson’s showed almost no symptoms. In other words, a higher innate inner drive to be visually creative or make art might be a natural defensive measure, diminishing the chance of developing neurodegeneration.
Researchers cannot determine how much dopamine a person has in their system. Nor can they determine how long a person who is diagnosed with Parkinson’s has actually had the disease. Some researchers believe that subtle symptoms may start 20 years before diagnosis.
. . . we found that in most case studies of artists who practiced before being diagnosed with Parkinson’s, both the patients and their doctors reported an increase, or at least no decrease, in the quantity, and often the quality, of the art.
The brain produces and allocates dopamine to the body on its own terms. When a patient uses dopamine replacement medications, they sometimes create a dopamine surge in the brain that causes side effects that mimic the symptoms that they are trying to stop. Do non-patients including artists, musicians, and writers who have drug or alcohol issues possibly suffer from a dopamine inhibitor? Does such an inhibitor exist? Maybe we will discover that someday, but we know now that the amount and timing of dopamine’s release has a visible effect up the patient perception of art.
We also found evidence, after patients were diagnosed and began dopamine therapy treatment, for a general movement from realism to abstraction or impressionism, more vibrant colors, and more use of crosshatching or lack of vertical or fluid strokes (perhaps due to cognitive symptoms or tremors).
I had DBS 5 years ago and I still only take 1/6th of the amount of dopamine replacement medications that I took before the surgery. When I was diagnosed in 2005, I was given a first generation dopamine agonist (a drug that tricks the brain into thinking that the drug is dopamine) that ultimately carried an FDA required impulse control warning. This “black box” warning came after some Parkinson’s patients who took these medications developed crippling gambling habits or sexual addictions, or engaged in compulsive shopping or binge eating. One could argue that my decision to run for political office was impulsive. It was certainly a gamble and I was fortunate to win. Nah. That’s not it. I must confess that I had always wanted to stand for election. Anyway, by that time I had changed neurologists and my new one prescribed the real stuff, carbidopa/levodopa, the drug that I was taking so much of prior to the DBS surgery.
The drive to make art appeared to diminish when dopamine medication was stopped or taken at a lower dosage, or when the patient was treated with deep brain stimulation, a procedure in which electrodes are surgically inserted into the brain to alleviate Parkinsonian symptoms—and which often coincides with reducing or stopping dopaminergic medication.
The article’s final reveal touches back on the difference between having an appreciation for art versus a talent for art. Apparently, creating art comes from a part of the brain different from that the part that appreciates art. Makes sense. That’s how I know that my paintings are bad even though I created them.
There’s a particularly interesting implication of this study. One of the most consistent, and surprising, findings was that there was very little difference between the two groups in their ratings of the likability or beauty of a painting: Their appraisals of beauty and art preferences were almost exactly the same between individuals with and without Parkinson’s disease. Similarly, individuals with stroke-related damage or with Alzheimer’s disease also show consistency in their ratings of art. For example, despite not remembering having previously participated in a study, when asked to rate the same art again, Alzheimer’s patients gave almost the same ratings as before. It may be that the aesthetic sense has so stable a foundation that it cannot even be touched by neurodegenerative disease, and appreciation of art and an increased desire to create it may be less interconnected than one might assume.
I will add “Explore artistic opportunities” to my Random Thoughts on YOPD.
"Do non-patients including artists, musicians, and writers who have drug or alcohol issues possibly suffer from a dopamine inhibitor? Does such an inhibitor exist?" -- this is fascinating and I've always wondered something along the same lines.
My background is art history because even though I studied words as art, I wanted to make thoughts visible and not use six thousand words to speak an image. I see your art in your words and I thank you for them.