The Brain Is A Beautiful Riddle -- Andrew Stevens

This Sydney Morning Herald article was written eight years ago. I'm reposting it, because --as I said before-- originally this blog focused on epilepsy awareness, but I took all my personal stories down and am just putting up pieces of interest. Or ones that interested me. Obviously I could cut and paste links:

https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/the-brain-is-a-beautiful-riddle-20140721-zv8xn.html

but speaking from experience, no one tends to chase down a link. The Brain Is A Beautiful Riddle is a complimentary piece, pretty sure it's okay to republish with credit given. On with the story!

Visual Arts

By Andrew Stephens July 25, 2014 — 11.45pm

Medical students may find it a useful diagnostic tool when Jim Chambliss takes them around the University of Melbourne’s Medical History Museum. The small institution’s walls and cabinets are, at the moment, not full of surgical equipment, clinical diagrams or anatomical displays but of art works, many made by people with epilepsy. Chambliss - a lawyer with a doctorate that unusually combined creative arts with medicine - has spent more than three years bringing these paintings and sculptures together. About one per cent of the population have the condition, so Chambliss had to find those who make art and were happy to show their work, be studied, write a personal statement and have their families involved.

The tours Chambliss conducts with medical students, educate them in how to use this art to help diagnose epilepsy, which can sometimes be difficult.

The art on the walls of the museum is certainly striking. Immediately apparent is the use of bright, even garish, palettes, lots of strong broken lines, and a wealth of surreal, often fragmented or morphed imagery. There are more than a few, too, that are reminiscent of the work of Vincent Van Gogh, who is believed to have had the condition.

Chambliss says these traits are reflected in his research and will help doctors not only in making diagnoses but in increasing their understanding and tolerance for ambiguity, and their empathy for those with conditions such as epilepsy.

In 1998, Chambliss suffered a traumatic brain injury that led to a form of epilepsy affecting the temporal lobe and involving sensory changes. The injury came after he was hit by a ute in a carpark; he suffered various injuries - knee, back, neck - and was diagnosed with minor concussion. When seizures started, he knew it was something more severe - but life-changing events followed and he discovered his own artistic abilities and desire to compassionately focus on others in similar circumstances.

The exhibit at the Medical History Museum is part of the university’s Cultural Treasures Festival, which unlocks various precious items and collections around the campus for public view. Chambliss is certainly enthused about the treasures he has collected from the artists he studied and says he hopes the newly forged connections with medical students will help prevent the common misdiagnosis and misunderstandings about people with epilepsy.

Chambliss’s research describes how people with epilepsy - described by Hippocrates as ‘‘the sacred disease’’ - have been, through the ages, thought to be possessed by demons, blessed with mystical insights and revelations or simply mentally ill. The exhibition Epilepsy: Perception, imagination and change investigates how focal epilepsy (where seizures occur in a limited area of one hemisphere of the brain) can significantly enhance visual creativity.

As he moves about the displays, Chambliss points out many common sorts of imagery and techniques, and explains the links between epilepsy and creativity he explored in his doctorate. Research results in recent years, he says, have shown that creativity is not simply located in one hemisphere of the brain: it comes from many points in that complex, still-mysterious organ.

Chambliss says that to understand how epilepsy and creativity are linked, it is helpful to see the cycle of epilepsy as similar to changes in weather patterns, with a seizure akin to a severe storm. But the influences on creativity are not limited to seizures themselves, or the periods of brain activity immediately before or after such an episode, he says. Chambliss has discovered that more than 90 per cent of the artists he studied in his research had what he terms ‘‘intrinsic perceptions’’, producing imagery they integrated into their art. These perceptions can be simple or complex hallucinations and include phenomena such as numinous auras, unique mystical or spiritual qualities, ecstatic seizures, out-of-body experiences, or distortion of spatial awareness or surreal events.

‘‘If you look at theories of creativity from a neurobiological perspective, the brain can be viewed as consisting of millions of nodes in clusters of neurons,’’ he says. ‘‘Each of those nodes has corresponding functions - memories, processors, inhibitors - for almost anything that can happen in the cognitive process. The theory is that if a person is in a state of disinhibition, with as many of the nodes firing off electrical impulses simultaneously, then conditions are right for a person to think creatively. ‘‘Focal epilepsy can cause a synchronous spread of electrical impulses that mix up the normal brain signals and sequences in seconds, both during and in between seizures. This can occur while a person is conscious, able to remember, and capable of recording the imagery, that has never been seen before by others, into visual art.

‘‘That novel imagery often appears dreamlike, surreal or extraordinarily imaginative. In addition, the electrical mischief of epilepsy usually begins in the same spot of the brain and spreads in relatively consistent patterns for a unique person with epilepsy. This can sometimes give him or her a consistent range of intrinsic perceptions – not based on realistic things – that can be like impulsively revisiting a dream while awake.’’ Chambliss, in the catalogue for the show, writes that some of the artists in his research reported that they have extended periods where ‘‘their desire to produce art becomes so compulsive that they continue to work into the later hours of the night’’. If they push it too far into fatigue, a seizure might be triggered.

In the catalogue, artists make personal statements that are both illuminating and moving about their experiences in life and art.

‘‘Sometimes my compulsive energy to make art flows with more activity during times when there is more frequency of seizures or auras from migraines and/or seizures,’’ writes United States artist Patricia Bernard. ‘‘During those periods, which can extend into days, there are powerful sensations of fear that come out of nowhere, that can go hand-in-hand with feelings of out-of-body experiences and/or sinking sensations.’’ Chambliss has a sculpture in the show which he says represents the ‘‘frustration and persistence to discover what happened to my brain, and who I became in adjusting to the devastating challenges, and how I evolved to be more creative’’ following his acquired epilepsy.

One artist, Peter Goodmant, reports that he had right temporal lobe surgery in 2012, after which ‘‘I found my mind empty of ideas for art and the inspiration to make new works or even continue pieces I had started pre-surgery’’. Even so, the seizures returned after 18 months. ‘‘With the return of a seizure state, my mind became full of new ideas for art. With a little pleasurable effort, I worked to translate these new images to the visual world, with results I consider as good as, if not better than, my pre-surgery work.’’

Epilepsy: Perception, Imagination and Change is at the University of Melbourne Medical History Museum until September 20 museum.medicine.unimelb.edu.au. artandepilepsy.com.

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If you've gotten this far, I'll add that often people ask where I get my ideas, and --as I say in my artist's statement-- many are just my calm in the eye of an electrical storm. Chambliss puts this so much better, so, like most artists do...I stole it. YOINK! Something he fails to mention, however, is that beyond that urge/drive/unquenchable thirst that keeps a neurodivergent painting for hours? It is work. Art is really difficult work. We love creating, we have to create if we're doing so, obviously...but it's important not to write off a work of art, literature, music as something that simply "happened" due to talent, gift, disability, or [ugh] LUCK alone. Of course there's the hours of joy, relief, passion, freedom, writing, playing, release, and paint-slinging...but then there's the following hours of tinkering, studying, rebuilding, perfecting, editing, etc, etc....Maybe that's another blogpost for another time. Thank you for reading.

~~RR