The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [149]
31 Henry Burun was bi-polar, what we used to call “manic depressive”— as were numerous artists, including poets Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, painters Vincent Van Gogh and Georgia O’Keeffe, jazz pianist Charles Mingus, etc. Had he had access to today’s new generation of antidepressants, Henry would have been able to “hold the dragon at bay,” as he described it, and still be alive today.
32 In his classic The Mind of a Mnemonist, the Russian neuroscientist Aleksandr Luria recorded the case of “S” (Solomon Shereshevski), a man who appears to have forgotten nothing. S was also a synaesthete; after meeting the legendary filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein in the 1930s, he described his voice as “a flame with protruding fibres.” Although possessing a greater eidetic memory than NB, S had similar difficulties in understanding and adapting to the everyday world around him (die alltägliche Umwelt). Neither one, to say the least, can be considered a typical synaesthete.
33 NB’s mistake here was crediting information supplied by NXB. I am not using chloral or chloral hydrate in any of my studies, either for amnesia or brain cancer. And although the drug was clearly from my lab, I am not the one who ordered it. It may have been part of NXB’s “literary studies,” as the highly addictive—and dangerous—drug was prescribed for insomnia in the nineteenth century. It hastened the mental collapse of Friedrich Nietzsche, gave paranoid hallucinations to Dante Rossetti and Evelyn Waugh, and destroyed André Gide’s memory.
34 Coincidentally, Alois Alzheimer, who practised in Germany in the 1890s, took an interest in his own country’s “Decadents,” particularly Jakob Wassermann, Frank Wedekind and Hanns Heinz Ewers. He makes only passing reference, however, to the earlier French Décadents Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé and Huysmans; and none at all to the English Decadents of the “Yellow Nineties”: Arthur Symons, Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson.
35 Emily Dickinson, “Wild Nights,” in Poems (1890).
36 Art therapy is based on the premise that words can act as a barrier, preventing people from expressing what is on their minds, and that creating art can allow people to describe their feelings without words. Through creating art and talking about the process of art-making with an art therapist, patients can “increase awareness of self, cope with symptoms, stress, and traumatic experiences, enhance cognitive abilities, and enjoy the life-affirming pleasures of artistic creativity.” I’m quoting from an Art Therapy of America pamphlet belonging to my wife, who took (expensive) courses in it. Some of this stuff is flaky at best, and most of it unproven.
Far more interesting are my experiments in transcranial magnetic stimulation, which will have applications for cognition, creativity and well-being. Using my own modified stimulator (VTMS©) on research subject JJY, I enhanced his visual and spatial memory, along with his creative skills and pleasure quotient. I targeted an island of tissue in the human gyrus, near the left ear, which serves as a kind of booster rocket for creativity. Below are the results of an experiment in which I asked JJY to draw a picture of a cat four times, at different stages of his exposure to VTMS©:
I then asked him to rewrite a line from his novel The Right Chemistry:
Her blouse was a really loud red colour.
Her blouse was scarlet, like the scream of someone falling through a skylight.
1. Before
2. After
At the final stages of each of these tests, JJY had a broad grin on his face. Like sex and eating, creating and experiencing art are pleasurable acts. Since the brain reinforces creative acts by rewarding brain cells with the neurotransmitter dopamine, creativity has an obvious role to play in our health and survival. Creative expression, in fact, may be the brain’s natural method of protecting itself from disease. I