Last weekend, Silicon Valley scientists and SJSU School of Music alumni collaborated on a revolutionary theatrical production. I had to go to Beverly Hills to see it.
Jake Broder’s play, UnRavelled, featured original music and sound design by Mark Grey, yet they were just two artists in a powerful creative alliance of theater-makers, neuroscientists, musicians, actors and brain health clinicians, all to elevate a true story, that of the remarkable connection between the work of Canadian painter Dr. Anne Adams (1940–2007) and French composer Maurice Ravel (1875–1937). Both Adams and Ravel lived with the same brain disease, frontotemporal dementia (FTD), almost 100 years apart.
The production brought expertise across disciplines with a few shared missions: to destigmatize dementia via empathy and compassion, while also demonstrating, through the vehicle of storytelling, that the neuroscience of creativity will help accelerate the cures for these conditions. The investors and medical institutions of Silicon Valley might take note.
“The principles of examining creativity through the lens of neuroscience reveal a lot of the same principles that exist with AI, in a sort of a stochastic sense,” Broder told me in a Zoom call. “And it establishes a different vehicle to look at the mechanism of creativity—through a mechanistic lens, through the lens of behavioral neurology—and I think if someone who was brilliant with AI were to come and look at this, they would see a lot of similarities and it would be, I think, very useful data.”
Dr. Anne Adams was an eminent Canadian biologist, who, in her 50s, began to exhibit radical personality changes. She abandoned her life’s work at the height of her career and suddenly, out of the blue, began painting. Starting out with simple subjects like strawberries, Adams became obsessed with the composer Maurice Ravel’s symphonic masterpiece, Boléro, which then launched her into a wildly different painting style.
Boléro was an unusual piece of music that alternated between two melodic themes, repeating over and over with increasing volume and layers of instrumentation over the course of 340 bars. Adams created an entire painting, Unravelling Boléro, a bar-by-bar visual representation of Ravel’s music.
Adams was eventually diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), the most common form of dementia in people under age 60, which often manifests with behavioral or language alterations—not the memory loss or paralysis common in other types of dementia. When she painted Unravelling Boléro, she didn’t know that Ravel himself had written his late-career masterpiece when he was likewise experiencing dramatic personality shifts. Ravel was also later diagnosed with FTD, the same condition, ultimately preventing him from composing further. Through Adams’ stunning visual interpretation of Boléro, her work seemed to offer new clues to the neuroscience of creativity.
Broder’s theatrical production was an interdisciplinary collaboration unlike anything I’ve seen, bringing together all the aforementioned creative and scientific perspectives. Some of the actors even had to study brain science.
The collective goal was to reinvent how relatives, caregivers and the community at large handled brain disease diagnoses. Was there a better way to move these situations forward knowing that improved creativity might still be possible if the disease was caught in the early stages? Can we manage these predicaments with more dignity and with love?
“Where I think this becomes actually kind of spiritual is, the idea that here is some evidence of a neurological condition that creates enhancements as well as deficits,” Broder said, adding that compassion, empathy and curiosity, when iteratively applied, can create wonderful outcomes, both scientifically and in caregiving.
“It reveals a kind of methodology which can help push the boundaries of human experience—on the high end, on the not-low end, but on the everyday end—and can help people approach their loved ones with more compassion, understanding, and appreciation of the resilience and ability that people with a diagnosis often have.”
Dr. Bruce Miller, the real-life doctor that diagnosed Anne Adams, was among those who attended the talk-back after the performance. Miller spoke to the efficacy of the UnRavelled theatrical collaboration, and how it affirmed recent encouraging developments in dementia and Alzheimer’s research.
“The hope of this play is the hope I feel in science,” he said.
