What Parkinson’s Reveals About the Artistic Spark

Parkinson’s disease is the fastest-growing neurological condition in the world, cur- rently affecting around 0.1 percent of the population and rising to 3 percent of those over the age of 65. The list of well-known patients is long— from Muhammad Ali to Vincent Price, to, more recently, Michael J. Fox. Find- ing ways to ease the symptoms and improve the lives of people with Par- kinson’s disease is a broad, urgent area of research. Along the way, the study of Parkinson’s patients is also having a re- markable, and rather unexpected, con- sequence: It may lead to new insights into the basis of the “artistic spark”— the neurobiology underlying the way we create and respond to art.