Unravelling Bolero

Seeley et. al published a fascinating paper entitled "Unravelling Bolero: progressive aphasia, transmodal creativity and the right posterior neocortex" in Brain, 2008. I don't discuss a lot of papers as I think they're dry and not everyone can get access, but I came across this one and found it curious. One way of approaching neurologic injury is to localize a disease process ("where's the lesion?") and then see what deficits result. For example, a stroke in the motor strip of the brain will lead to contralateral weakness, and so it can be inferred that the affected anatomy has something to do with motor function. But the authors discuss an interesting idea: some lesions in the brain can stimulate new artistic or musical talents. Maurice Ravel was a French composer best known for his orchestral work "Bolero." Near the end of his career, he developed a progressive language and motor disorder. There are hypotheses that as his speech declined, his musical prowess heightened. The authors of this paper present a case study of a patient with frontal-insular primary progressive aphasia who paints. They follow her art from her preclinical phase through her progressive dementia and study her brain imaging. I love the paper because its figures are artwork, from a representation of the number pi to a visual image of Ravel's Bolero. You can see how this patient's paintings change over time, presumably due to her neurologic illness. As her language and speech function disappears, her expression through artwork becomes more and more beautiful. It reminds me how little we know of the brain and how this story can give insight into something as strange as the development of a new talent.