Abstract
A large number of studies, including single case and case series studies, have shown that patients with different types of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) are characterized by the emergence of artistic abilities. This led to the hypothesis of enhanced creative thinking skills as a function of these pathological conditions. However, in the last years, it has been argued that these brain pathologies lead only to an augmented “drive to produce” rather than to the emergence of creativity. Moreover, only a few studies analyzed specific creative skills, such as divergent thinking (DT), by standardized tests. This Mini-Review aimed to examine the extent to which DT abilities are preserved in patients affected by FTD. Results showed that DT abilities (both verbal and figural) are altered in different ways according to the specific anatomical and functional changes associated with the diverse forms of FTD. On the one hand, patients affected by the behavioral form of FTD can produce many ideas because of unimpaired access to memory stores (i.e., episodic and semantic), but are not able to recombine flexibly the information to produce original ideas because of damages in the pre-frontal cortex. On the other hand, patients affected by the semantic variant are impaired also in terms of fluency because of the degradation of their semantic memory store. Potential implications, limitations, and future research directions are discussed.
Highlights
Frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) represents a group of neurodegenerative brain diseases characterized by a fairly focal onset of degeneration of the frontal and/or anterior temporal lobes
The literature search of available sources describing DT abilities in patients with a diagnosis of FTD was conducted on PubMed, Google Scholar, and Scopus with the following keywords: “frontotemporal dementia AND divergent thinking,” “frontotemporal dementia AND creativity,” “primary progressive aphasia AND divergent thinking,” and “primary progressive aphasia AND creativity.”
A growing amount of studies support the role of semantic memory in creative cognition
Summary
Frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) represents a group of neurodegenerative brain diseases characterized by a fairly focal onset of degeneration of the frontal and/or anterior temporal lobes. One of the clinical entities associated with FTLD is frontotemporal dementia (FTD), a neurodegenerative disorder that expresses itself with different clinical presentations (Gossye et al, 2019). Artistic creativity (i.e., poetry, paintings, etc.) can be expressed by some exceptional cases of patients affected by neurodegenerative diseases (Palmiero et al, 2012; de Souza et al, 2014), including specific variants of FTD (see Geser et al, 2021 and Miller and Miller, 2013 for a review). This “de novo” creative production is not observed in all FTD variants.
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