An article published by STAT explores the connection between the onset of FTD and a spike in visual creativity that a small percentage of people with the disease experience.

The article introduces Carol Spence, a woman diagnosed with FTD who experienced a surge in creativity as the disease progressed. Already a talented crafter who made miniature dolls, Spence was familiar with art – but after FTD, she turned to painting. After an incident where Spence painted over an antique table, her daughter, Paige Spence-Berthiaume, ensured she was always stocked with art supplies.

As the article highlights, though, FTD-induced spikes in creativity are considerably different from the use of art therapy to manage the disease’s symptoms. Adit Freeberg, a research fellow at the Memory and Aging Center of the University of California, San Fransisco, told STAT that people with FTD-induced creativity might develop an affinity for art they never had before, showing a dramatic shift in what they produce, or dedicate an enormous amount of time to it.

“It’s really a brain disease that affects people in sometimes strikingly different ways depending on which parts of the brain it starts in,” Bradford Dickerson, director of the FTD unit at Massachusetts General Hospital and AFTD medical advisor, told STAT.

As some recent studies have shown, the atrophy patterns common with FTD can, at times, reduce regions of the brain that suppress activity in the dorsomedial occipital cortex, a segment of the occipital lobe that serves as the brain’s visual processing center. It is theorized that the atrophy of the areas suppressing the occipital lobe causes more intense visual experiences for people affected by FTD, contributing to their visual creativity.

However, as the article notes, not all FTD-induced creativity is purely based on painting. Other artists affected by FTD have used art forms like sculpting or composing music, such as famed French composer Maurice Ravel, whose famous final composition Boléro is believed to have been written while he was affected by FTD.

Boléro would later connect Ravel to another artist, Dr. Anne Adams, a Canadian scientist-turned-painter diagnosed with FTD. Dr. Adams’ painting Unravelling Boléro translated each bar of the piece to a visual medium – at the time of creating the artwork, Dr. Adams had no idea of Ravel’s suspected diagnosis.

While capable of creating spectacular results, the spike in creativity does not slow FTD. The article shares how Spence’s art changed as her art progressed. As the areas of her brain critical to recognizing faces and emotions were affected, her self-portraits began to show increasingly empty facial expressions. Like Adams and Ravel, Spence would eventually lose her ability to create art due to FTD.

The article notes that while FTD may be a brutal disease, the creative spikes it can cause are more than just beautiful: they serve as a way for people to express themselves, connect to those around them, and create beautiful works to remember them by.

Dr. Anne Adams and Maurice Ravel’s connection through art was the subject of the play UnRavelled. AFTD sponsored a recent one-night performance at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

A report on this topic was also recently broadcast by KPIX in San Francisco; click here to learn more.