How Creativity Can Enrich Your Journey Through Brain Injury

Artist Katie Caron created Neuron Forest after surviving a brain injury. Watch the process Katie used to for her collaboration with the Center for Bioethics at the University of Colorado

By Eliza Marie Somers

Brain Injury Hope Foundation co-founder Dr. Mary Ann Keatley started the August 9, 2024, Survivor Series: How Creativity Can Enrich Your Journey Through Brain Injury with a story about composer Derek Amato.

Amato suffered his seventh brain injury right before his 40^th birthday when he hit his head diving into the shallow bottom of a pool. The fifth day after his injury he sat down at a piano and started playing complex musical chords despite the fact that he had played only “Chopsticks” before the TBI.

“It was instant,” Amato says in the YouTube video “Derek Amato, Sudden Musical Genius”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTHDuZo7G3Y

Amato’s amazing creative talent is known as acquired savant syndrome, which is someone who suddenly develops an extraordinary ability in music, art, math, or another field after sustaining a head injury, stroke or other neurologic illness.

Amato also “sees” music as black-and-white squares with musical notes, a phenomenon known as synesthesia, which causes sensory crossovers such as tasting colors.

• Link to synesthesia 
• Story from Brain & Life magazine 

Keatley referenced Dr. Bruce Miller, who coined the term emergent creativity after observing creativity in patients with dementia in which the loss of function in the anterior temporal lobes may lead to the “facilitation” of artistic skills. It has also been observed in people who have suffered a TBI or a stroke.

• Emergent creativity 

“What (Miller) said is that people who sustain this injury have almost a compulsive urge to create. They want to create,” Keatley explained. “He believes that the savant skills emerge because the injured areas that are associated with logic and verbal communication and comprehension have been inhibiting these latent artistic abilities that were present all the time. As the LEFT brain shuts down due to injury, the circuits in the right brain that keep it in check disappear and the areas in the RIGHT brain associated with creativity emerge.”

Keatley also noted studies by neuroscientists Alan Snyder and Berit Brogaard. Snyder believes savants can access raw sensory information, normally off-limits to the conscious mind because the brains’ percentual region isn’t functioning. And Brogaard thinks that when brain cells become injured or die, they release a barrage of neurotransmitters, and these potent chemicals actually rewire parts of the brain opening up new neural pathways into areas that were previously unavailable. The reorganization that occurs, allows the possibility to access information that was dormant before.

“I think they are all kind of true,” Keatley said and then gave examples of her patients who developed creative talents after a brain injury.

One of Keatley’s patients began to speak in rhymes. “Everything she said became poetry. And it was quite beautiful. I’ve seen people who couldn’t draw at all, and then all of a sudden, they’re producing beautiful art and paintings that they are selling and making a living on them.”

Keatley credits neuroplasticity (the brain’s ability to regrow cells and neuropathways) for developing dormant creative instincts after a brain injury. “We have the ability, we just didn’t do it until after the injury,” she said.

Another theory associated with creativity after a brain injury is TBI survivors go into a theta state after the injury. This is the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep, also known as hypnagogia.

• Link to hypnagogia story 

“A lot of people with brain injuries say they feel foggy, hazy and can’t seem to wake up,” Keatley said. “This is also the creative state.”

Panelist Katie Caron, an artist and educator, injected, “This is why I like sleeping in. I’m an artist, and I always want to be able to sleep in because between the waking state and sleeping I usually solve a lot of creative problems.”

Keatley agreed, “One thing, if you present yourself with a problem at night before you go to sleep, then a lot of times the answer will be available after moving into a hypnagogic state, and then waking up.”

Caron, a brain injury survivor, is chair of Studio Art and Head of Ceramics and 3D Design at Arapahoe Community College in Littleton, Colorado. She sustained a brain injury after graduating college 13 years ago when a 900-pound wall in her art studio fell on her and shattered her pelvis and dislocated her spine from her hip. She ended up in a nursing home in Detroit.

Artist Katie Caron says this artwork represents the collision of a wall falling on her.

“And when you think about depression and what that does to someone, at that time in their lives, it was pretty, pretty, brutal. So, I started making art. I was already kind of creatively in the zone for making work.”

However, the type of art she created in the nursing home was quite different than the ceramic art she made in school for her thesis.

“I was very, very angry,” Caron said. “You know, when you experience trauma there’s a lot of reliving that trauma over and over again in your mind. And I couldn’t stop reliving that trauma in my mind. My body was broken, and so that was obvious, but what was going on in my mind was something I don’t think was obvious to a lot of people.”

Caron began to create art with large archival glassine museum paper by crumpling up pieces, unfolding them and then coloring the paper with markers.

“I just started wrinkling it up like smashing it together violently, like I was violently smashed. That physical action gave me some sense of relief. And then I kind of quietly opened it up,” she explained.

After hanging the paper on the wall, Caron said she moved her wheelchair to the wall and she meticulously went over every single wrinkle with markers, creating what she now calls, “Heartland Drawings.” To view her art, visit https://katiecaron.com/Heartland-Drawings

The images “represent that point of contact where that wall hit my body,” she said. “And I just kind of put all my energy and pain into these drawings.”

Artist Katie Caron says creating art helps her process difficult emotions.

After moving back to Colorado and years of recovery, Caron became an adjunct teacher at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design. She also started creating ceramic and 3D art.

She explained creating art “helps process difficult emotions. … so, I think sometimes it’s our language that can express things that words can’t.”

During her recovery, Caron developed a fascination with the brain and how it works that resulted in her artwork: Neuron Forest.

“We’re doing everything we can to heal the body, but the mind is a lot harder to heal sometimes,” she said. “Because of that trauma I got really interested in the brain and neurons,” she said. To view the Neuron Forest, visit https://www.katiecaron.com/Neuron-Forest

Brain injury survivor Sharon Mehesy is an author and poet. Her book “A Likely Story,” was written with her mother, Eberly, and details Mehesy’s long recovery after a near fatal car accident in 1997. At the time of the accident Mehesy was an English major at Northeastern State University in Oklahoma, but afterward she had to relearn how to eat, swallow, talk and walk. She could no longer write causing deep depression for more than a year.

It took another car accident for Mehesy to shake the darkness and realize she had another chance at life. She changed her major to recreational therapy and is now a Brain Injury Group Facilitator with the Southwest Center for Independence in Durango, Colorado.

• Link to SWCI https://swindependence.org/#

Author and poet Sharon Mehesy says a second car accident changed her perspective: I was so focused on what I lost, I forget to notice what I still had.