Kind: captions
Language: en
[Music]
sometimes inspiration comes from the
most unlikely of places as in the case
of an Adams a scientist turned
painter zoologist an Adams loved art but
between working and raising a family she
had little time to enjoy it then
suddenly in her 50s she started painting
fulltime she started painting an
incredible amount she would do this
regularly day in and day
out there was an absolute explosion of
output there is so much art I don't know
how she ever had the time to do it in a
24-hour day but she did it what could
account for this huge creative explosion
it turns out at the same time something
was going terribly wrong in Anne's brain
she was having trouble finding words it
started off very very low level and
didn't really affect her in conversation
that much but it kept getting worse Her
speech became simpler uh eventually uh
by the time that we saw an she was only
able to produce a few nouns and can you
tell me your
address
um her grammar was gone her verbs were
gone even the saying simple words like a
bird was hard for
an scans taken over the course of 6
years show what was happening in Anne's
brain because of a rare brain disorder
brain tissue was deteriorating in her
left hemisphere in this area highlighted
in
blue but in the right hemisphere in the
area highlighted in Orange just the
opposite was happening it appeared to be
growing could these changes explain her
Newfound
creativity to find out Nova science now
host David Pogue visited two brain
experts okay so an Adams uh gradually
over time lost speech what was going on
in her brain well she began to lose
verbal abilities non-verbal abilities
compensated but how does compensation
work why didn't she just lose speech
well because she still needed to
communicate and she chose to represent
sound and words in paintings wow people
who have strokes that affect one side of
the brain learn to communicate in
non-verbal ways oh I see the brain's not
a muscle but when you exercise it by
doing only non-verbal tasks then the
non-verbal side of the brain starts to
develop better abilities if you took a
brain scan you would see an enlargement
of that area of the
brain in an's case the changes in her
brain inspired her to create an
extraordinary painting based on B
the musical composition written by
Maurice
rll and tried to capture in this musical
piece what rll was doing but she did it
visually an translated rll's compulsive
repetitive composition into hundreds of
repeating shapes she called it
unraveling
Bolero 6 years after finishing it she
was finally diagnosed with a progressive
form of dementia that would eventually
take her life it explained everything
that was happening to her but the
diagnosis revealed another astonishing
fact in a strange twist of fate a half
century earlier Revel was diagnosed with
the same disorder something an Adams
didn't know when she painted her tribute
to Bolero what this means is that both
Maurice rivel and an Adams may have
compensated for their loss of brain
function with a burst of creativity the
brain compensates for the loss this is
exactly what happens as you lose uh one
circuit another circuit is turned on
more of the time it compensates and it
develops new skills that allow us to
cope