Aphasia and Artistic Realization

Art and brain: insights from neuropsychology, biology and evolution

“…Historically, in 1948 the neurologist Thé ophile Alajouanine published the first neurological paper devoted to a description of the consequences of brain damage in three artists; their virtuosity spanned painting, music and writing (Alajouanine, 1948). They suffered from left hemisphere damage and varying levels of aphasia.…”

“…In one interesting outcome involving an artist, the neglect was not manifested in the outline drawing itself (it was complete on both sides) but rather in the application of the colors to the drawing; the left half of the drawing was left uncolored, whereas the right was colored (Blanke et al 2003). A rare case of a writer with left hemisphere damage suffering from aphasia described by Alajouanine (1948) was unable to write again because of the strong specialization of language in the left hemisphere. Ultimately, the brain regions that give rise to these deficits do not control the essence of art expression under normal, intact conditions.…”

Amusias and modularity of musical cognitive processing.

“…Henson (1977) mentioned important studies that were performed with composers who had brain damage. One of the most famous studies was conducted by Alajouanine (1948) where he evaluated the composer Maurice Ravel, who manifested progressive aphasia associated with a loss of the ability to compose music because of impairment in processing compositional rules. In turn, Luria, Tsvetkova, & Futer (1965) studied the composer Vissarion Shebalin who had aphasia without amusia caused by stroke.…”

Tomas Tranströmer’s stroke of genius

“…As if anticipating his own fate, in his longest poem Baltics (1974), he had referred to the story of a composer who became speechless and hemiplegic after a brain bleed: career after losing his own speech through a brain insult that rendered him unable to express musical ideas in either writing or performance. 2 Neurology as a medical specialty was founded in the late 19 th century when disfunctioning structures of the brain were localised according to the anatomico-pathological method. A founding cornerstone of this approach was the 1861 structural localisation of expressive language, which was found to reside over the foot of the third left frontal convolution.…”