ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests it is premature to make any final judgments about prospects for a neuropsychology of art. It reviews four ways in which neurological disorders might improve art: the disposition to produce visual art, provision of a unique visual vocabulary, aids to descriptive accuracy, and changes in expressive powers. Fronto-temporal dementias are a group of degenerative neurological diseases in which people undergo profound changes in their personalities. Neurological disorders such as migraine and epilepsy can be associated with productive visual phenomena. The effects of brain damage on the capacity to produce visual art can stand in sharp contrast to many other human capacities. When looking at the effects of brain damage on artistic production, group studies are probably impossible. Discussions of their art, if simply reduced to the effects of brain damage, are likely to be off-putting. One might expect that sensitivity to different attributes within a work of art would be affected by different kinds of brain damage.
