Artistic Savants

How is creativity related to health and mental illness? What is the relationship between the nature of the unconscious and the predisposition to both creativity and mental illness? These questions are explored with reference to research on: creativity, imagination and primary process thinking, intuition and unconscious processes, dream sleep, and aspects of schizophrenia. A positive model of mental health that sees creativity as an aspect of self-realisation is outlined in terms of homeostasis and the importance of information flow between neuropsychological systems. The role of executive function and attention in controlling information flow between the cerebellar unconscious and the cerebral conscious is noted, with reference to

While the various tests reported here have produced results of limited usefulness, confirming that gross neurophysiological structures probably cannot explain the savant, that psychometric test results vary with the motivation of the subject, and that the obvious has once more been confirmed, that artistic autistic individuals have rather limited verbal sequential abilities and have quite good visual spatial skills, such results may assist others and the present speaker in deciding how they will study savants in future. Essentially, methods for studying very low ability savants are limited dramatically by their lack of verbal and written skills; however, it cannot be beyond the wit of experimentalists in this field to find solutions.

In this single case study, paintings by a visually impaired and cognitively handicapped savant artist are evaluated. He paints his pictures exclusively from memory, either after having looked at a natural scene through binoculars, or after studying landscape photographs in brochures, catalogues, and books. The paintings are compared with the models from which they were derived, and the resulting generative changes are accounted for by an interaction between impaired visual input and memory transformations.