Jerusalem: Parkinson's patients are more creative than their healthy peers, scientists have found. Professor Rivka Inzelberg of Tel Aviv University's Sackler Faculty of Medicine and the Sagol Neuroscience Center at Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, has conducted the first empirical study to verify a link between Parkinson's disease and artistic inclination.
The study, published in the Annals of Neurology, definitively demonstrates that Parkinson's patients are more creative than their healthy peers, and that those patients taking higher doses of medication are more artistic than their less-medicated counterparts.
"It began with my observation that Parkinson's patients have a special interest in art and have creative hobbies incompatible with their physical limitations," said Inzelberg.
In a paper two years ago in Behavioral Neuroscience, Inzelberg reviewed case studies from around the world and found them to be consistent. In the new research, she conducted the first comprehensive study to measure the creative thinking of Parkinson's patients. Inzelberg and a team of researchers from TAU, the Sheba Medical Center, and Bar-Ilan University conducted a full battery of tests on 27 Parkinson's patients treated with anti-Parkinson's drugs and 27 age- and education-matched healthy controls.
The tests included the Verbal Fluency exam, in which a person is asked to mention as many different words beginning with a certain letter and in a certain category (fruit, for example) as possible.
The participants were then asked to undergo a more challenging Remote Association Test, in which they had to name a fourth word (following three given words) within a fixed context. The groups also took the Tel Aviv University Creativity Test, which tested their interpretation of abstract images and assessed the imagination inherent in answers to questions like "What can you do with sandals?"
The final exam was a version of the Test for a Novel Metaphor, adapted specifically for the study. Throughout the testing, Parkinson's patients offered more original answers and more thoughtful interpretations than their healthy counterparts.
In order to rule out the possibility that the creative process evident in the hobbies of patients was linked to obsessive compulsions like gambling and hoarding, to which many Parkinson's patients fall prey, participants were also asked to fill out an extensive questionnaire.
An analysis indicated no correlation between compulsive behaviour and elevated creativity. The conclusions from the second round of testing - in which the Parkinson's participants were split into higher- and lower-medicated groups - also demonstrated a clear link between medication and creativity.
