A former judge in Folsom, Calif., has discovered a newfound talent for visual art following a diagnosis of primary progressive aphasia, KCRA in Sacramento reported earlier this year.

Two years ago, Dylan Sullivan would never have called herself an artist. As a judge in El Dorado, Calif. Superior Court, her world was the law, her shelves groaning with volumes of dense legalese and a never-ending procession of attorneys through her courtroom.

She retired shortly after her PPA diagnosis. In the last year, her family told KCRA, her ability to communicate has quickly declined. But as a consequence of the disorder, the part of her brain responsible for artistic ability seems to have bloomed: She’s developed a facility for drawing in which every point, every line and every shape is made with deft precision.

Sullivan contributed two of her colored pencil drawings to the 2024 FTD in the Arts exhibit, which were displayed during the 2024 AFTD Education Conference in Houston.

“The remarkable thing about [PPA] is that it tends to attack circuits in the front of the brain,” said Dr. Bruce Miller, director of the Global Brain Health Institute (GBHI) at the University of California, San Francisco, and an emeritus member of the AFTD Medical Advisory Council.

“The group of people who develop degeneration in the left frontal, or left anterior temporal lobe, there’s more than a chance of an increase in visual creativity,” Dr. Miller said. (Dr. Miller is not Sullivan’s doctor, but is familiar her case through his work at GBHI.)

“When we image the people with this condition, the back part of the brain, which is completely unaffected by the neurodegenerative process, is very activated,” Dr. Miller continued. “This is the part of the brain that processes visual information. I think this hotness, this increased activity, correlates with a visual interest in a lot of the people who become artists.”

Dr. Miller–the recipient of AFTD’s 2024 Susan Newhouse & Si Newhouse Award of Hope–has studied the link between artistic creativity and FTD for nearly 30 years, publishing numerous studies on the topic and speaking frequently to the media about his findings.

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