Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience,
University College London, London, UK. c.mulvenna@ucl.ac.uk
For over 100 years the link between
synaesthesia and the arts has attracted controversy. This has been spurred by
the production of auditory, literary and visual art by famous individuals who
report experiences synonymous with the neurological condition. Impressive
protagonists in this discussion include Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire,
Vasily Kandinsky, Vladimir Nabokov, Alexander Scriabin, Olivier Messiaen and
David Hockney. Interdisciplinary debates have concerned whether synaesthesia
can actively contribute to an artist's ability, whether it is a driving force
or a mere idiosyncratic quirk and whether, fundamentally, it is a distinct
idiopathic condition or an unusual metaphorical description of normal
perception. Recent psychological and neuroscientific evidence offers a new
level to the debate. Coherent patterns of a neural basis of synaesthesia have
been confirmed with high spatial resolution brain imaging techniques and the
link with the arts is transpiring to be more than superficial or coincidental.
Moreover, the neural distinction of the synaesthete brain may prove to be a
window into a neural basis of creative cognition, and therefore conducive to
the expression of creativity in various media.
In: Bogousslavsky J, Hennerici MG (eds): Neurological
Disorders in Famous Artists – Part 2. (Frontiers
in Neurology and Neuroscience, vol. 22), 2007, pp. 206-222.