Cognition et création : la mémoire du vent

The powerful affinity between neurology and visual art goes back to the antiquity. Some very famous painters have experienced a neurological or psychiatric illness, and there are hundreds of artistic works that deal, in one way or another, with medical themes such as illness, suffering and death. Recent reports of changes in art performance among patients with Alzheimer's disease and patients with frontotemporal dementia have provided an unexpected window to the neurology of art. In this paper we study three aspects of the relationship between cognition and creativity: a) the changes that result in the paintings of established artists suffering from dementia, b) the development of exceptional and unexpected artistic skills triggered by dementia in patients who have never previously painted, and c) visual art and brain plasticity. We present a new case of a 63-year-old man with Alzheimer disease who began to painting few months after the diagnosis had been established and we provide a review of literature concerning the neural base and the neuropsychology of visual artistic production.