| The Neurobiology of the Arts |
Stars in His Eyes “It often seems to me that night is still more richly colored than the day, having hues of the most intense violets, blues, and greens,” he later wrote. “If only you pay attention to it you will see that certain stars are citron-yellow, others have a pink glow, or a green-blue and forget-me-not brilliance.” It was the artist’s sensitivity to the nuances of hue that first drew Shahram Khoshbin, HMS associate professor of neurology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, to van Gogh’s work. As a fine-arts student in Beirut, Khoshbin wrote his senior thesis on the painter’s florid use of tertiary colors, which emerge when a secondary color blends with a primary color. “Through years of experimentation, van Gogh had discovered he could pair certain colors—such as blue-violet with yellow-orange—to evoke emotions,” says Khoshbin. “Such color combinations can trigger autonomic responses in viewers. When you stand before many of his paintings, your palms turn sweaty, your breaths come rapidly, and your heartbeat quickens.” Despite his passion for art, Khoshbin ended up turning to medicine instead. Soon his growing fascination with neurology led him to ponder van Gogh’s behavior as well as his art. Dozens of diagnoses—from schizophrenia, to bipolar disorder, lead poisoning, and absinthe toxicity—had already been advanced to explain van Gogh’s vibrant paintings, eccentric life, and dramatic death. While a medical student at Johns Hopkins, though, Khoshbin seized the chance to ask the late Norman Geschwind ’51, a pioneer in behavioral neurology who was at Hopkins to give a lecture about Fyodor Dostoevsky, about van Gogh’s diagnosis. “That’s simple,” Geschwind replied, “he had epilepsy—just like Dostoevsky.” Khoshbin felt surprised, even after he learned that van Gogh’s own doctor had diagnosed the artist with epilepsy, because he doubted the disease could account for the full range of van Gogh’s symptoms. But an incident the following year made that diagnosis resonate after all. While volunteering in an art-therapy studio, Khoshbin noticed that few of the patients used tertiary colors in their gouache paintings. One evening, as he was helping the janitor tidy the studio, he mentioned his observation. The elderly man walked him downstairs to a custodial closet filled with brooms, mops, and the rustling sounds of nesting rats. There the janitor pulled out boxes and boxes of artwork he had collected over the decades. On the back of each of the hundreds of paintings he had inscribed the artist’s diagnosis. “The schizophrenics’ artwork was meticulous and detailed,” Khoshbin remembers. “The depressed patients had splashed black and brown everywhere. But what stunned me was the box filled with art by the epileptics: in almost every painting they had used tertiary colors.” Years later, while working with patients who had suffered damage to the temporal lobe, Khoshbin discovered that they perceive colors as being brighter and images as more vivid than other people do. “Sensory integration takes place in the temporal lobe,” Khoshbin says, “so it’s easy to understand how a disturbance in that part of the brain can create a different sensory experience.” Khoshbin now believes van Gogh suffered from not just temporal lobe epilepsy, but also a personality disorder associated with it, dubbed the Geschwind syndrome; in the early 1970s, Geschwind had identified a constellation of five personality traits: hypergraphia, or voluminous graphic output; hyper-religiosity; unstable sexual behavior; intermittent aggressiveness; and clinginess. Van Gogh exhibited all five traits. His hyperreligiosity, for example, once led to his being fired from his job as an evangelist minister for “excessive zeal.” He alternated between periods of hypersexuality and hyposexuality and between liaisons with women and with men. His stormy relationship with the painter Paul Gauguin illustrated not only his clinginess—Gauguin bemoaned the difficulty of ending conversations with van Gogh—but also his aggression. It was just after threatening Gauguin with a razor that van Gogh famously lopped off part of his own earlobe and presented it with much flourish to a young lady of the night. Dramatic, too, was van Gogh’s hypergraphia. A largely self-taught artist who didn’t start painting until the age of 27, he nonetheless created more than 2,000 works of art before his suicide a decade later. The year he described the vibrancy of colors in the night sky—and painted his masterpiece Starry Night—in fact, was so fertile he was producing, on average, a new painting, watercolor, or drawing every 36 hours. When he wasn’t clutching a paintbrush or stick of charcoal, he was grasping a pen, writing long letters far into the night. Those letters reveal much about van Gogh, from his obsession with color to his instincts for the divine. “When I have a terrible need of—shall I say the word—religion,” van Gogh once wrote to his brother Theo, “then I go outside in the night to paint the stars.” Paula Byron has been the editor of the Harvard Medical Alumni Bulletin since 1998. This article appeared in the Spring 2005 issue of the Harvard Medical Alumni Bulletin. Image: Corbis KIPA |
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