Creative artists not only experience the world differently they also view the world differently. Picasso and Kandinsky, two of the well known creative geniuses of our time, both had disorders that forced them to perceive their world differently: could these disorders be one of the underlying factors that facilitated their genius?

Strabismus & Picasso
Stereopsis, the ability to have depth perception, is important for artists in order for them to paint the three-dimensional world realistically but new studies have shown that possibly many great artists did not have depth perception. Pablo Picasso, one of the many artists who had strabismus – abnormal alignment of the eyes – was able to create amazing pieces of art despite his inability to perceive depth. For him, this disorder made it easier for him to reproduce his two-dimensional representation of his subject matter. Margaret S. Livingstone and Bevil R. Conway state that “someone who cannot perceive depth from stereopsis may be more aware of—and therefore better able to capture—the other, monocular, cues to depth and distance, such as perspective, shading, and occlusion.” This can be seen in the painting on the left, Picasso’s The Old Guitarist where his shading skill and lack of depth perception is apparent. Picasso, is largely known for his cubist pieces, it is evident that going the route to cubism was ideal for his skill set due to his disorder.

Synesthesia & Kandinsky
Synesthesia is a neurological disorder where activation of one sensory areas instantly activates another sensory area. Wassily Kandinsky, for example, saw colors when he listened to music–when his auditory cortex was stimulated, his visual cortex was instantly stimulated. This cross wiring can make day to day activities hard–raindrops on an umbrella send flashes of color across ones visual field. But for artists, especially for Kandinsky, this disorder opened a wave of creativity. The piece reproduced below was made by Kandinsky while listening to a classical piece. It has been said that Kandinsky created a schema to represent the myriad tones and chords–yellow represented middle C on a trumpet, combinations of colors represented piano vibrational frequencies. The movement exhibited by his brushstrokes and the vivid color palette he uses make his pieces unbelievably beautiful. If it was not for his disorder this piece and all his other pieces would be drastically different.

Harvard Medicine: Neurobiology of the Arts

Wassily Kandinsky

Pablo Picasso

Synesthesia is a neurological condition which joins sensory perceptions. The most common variety links numbers and letters (and often words like the days of the week) with colors. However people with synethesia can experience a slew of unique sensations ranging from tasting shapes to seeing sounds.

In neurologist Richard Cytowic’s book, ‘The Man Who Tasted Shapes’, a synesthetic dinner host describes his experiences: “When I taste something with an intense flavor, the feeling sweeps down my arms into my fingertips. I feel its weight, texture, [temperature], everything. I feel it like I’m actually grasping something.” For him, the taste and aroma of a meal elicit a strong tactile sensation.

Before extensive studies had been conducted on this condition, accounts of synathetic experiences were viewed as out-of-the-ordinary imaginative metaphors and not taken seriously. But in recent years Cytowic has heavily researched synesthesia and has determined its diagnostic criteria, the most significant being that these mixed perceptions are involuntary and automatic.

Tests such as the one below have shown to prove the case.  When the image to the left is presented to an individual without the condition, he/she considers it slightly difficult to distinguish the 5’s from the 2’s. Synesthetes (in particular those with a number-color association) can almost seamlessly make the distinction between the numbers due to the specific colors which they may have come to innately pair with them (as the image on the right shows, the synesthete associates 5 with green and 2 with red).

There have been multiple theories for synesthesia. A popular one suggested that it was caused by neural “cross-wiring” between interpretive areas. For example, a color processing region in the brain’s visual cortex called V4 lies adjacent to an area responsible for identifying letters and numbers, and a mixed perception of color and letters/numbers could be attributed to cross activation between these areas.

However,  Cytowic and his collegue David Eagleman propose a better hypothesis: that the neurological condition is really caused by a slight difference in the balance of excitation and inhibition. When chemical inhibitors, which repress other types of processing during a specific sense experience, are blocked, it is possible to sense blue from a red object without any contradiction. This theory was put forward because we know that non-synesthetes can aquire synethesic “symptoms” under the influence of psychoactive drugs like LSD.  So, we’re all capable of producing unnatural sensory combinations, but a lucky few of us can do it everyday.

The Man Who Tasted Shapes by Richard E. Cytowic

Dr. Richard E. Cytowic’s Website

Neurocognitive Mechanisms of Synesthesia