Can Brain Damage Cause a Personality Disorder?

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Dick is not the man he once was. Eight years ago, his wife Lynn began noticing changes in Dick that she could not explain.

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His personality has changed in that he is less aware of the effect his behavior has on people. There's much less empathy than there used to be.

He can get very agitated if things aren't going his own way, which he wouldn't have done before. He would have just sorted it. I live with the husband I love dearly, but we can't even watch a film together on television, because he can't follow the plot.

Dick's been diagnosed as having a degenerative brain disease. It's slowly destroying the front of his brain.

My wife was given to understand that it might well just be two years before I was in a mental-- well, I suppose some sort of home, anyway, and that she would not be able to look after me. But in point of fact, we've had seven years. And it's gone pretty well.

I must drive her to distraction, but I'm unaware of it. One of the strange byproducts of my illness is that you don't really mind. So from that point of view, it's pretty good.

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What's remarkable about this disease is that as cells are gradually dying off in the front of Dick's brain, his entire personality is undergoing a dramatic change.

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Frontal lobes are the most sophisticated part of the brain, the part that makes us individually different from each other. They are very important for our temperament, our social interaction. Our personal style all depends very much on the frontal lobes.

Damage to his brain is turning the person Dick was into a very different individual who is behaving in very different ways.

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He's always been very good at telling jokes and stories. But now he does upset people sometimes in some situations, because the jokes are inappropriate. Although he was told some of the things he'd been doing, it didn't matter to him. He didn't see the significance of them. And nor do I wish him to know some of time. If he doesn't feel it in his self, then what's the point of just always pointing out to him what he's doing, what he's saying.

As Dick's condition has worsened, something incredible has happened. The brain damage has released abilities that Dick never knew he had. He has become overwhelmed with the urge to paint.

I've put diluted ink onto the paper. And the idea really is to just build up a pattern, which later, I will try to interpret into-- sorry-- some reasonable picture.

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As his brain continues to degenerate, this new skill, sadly, will fade, and this new personality will disappear.

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There we are. I never reckoned I could paint anything in particular. I was never wonderful about that. I enjoyed doing art at school, but that was forty-odd years ago. And I haven't done any art since then.

I think the interesting thing is not whether the pictures are any good-- that's almost an irrelevance-- but the fact that you're doing it for the first time in all that time. I quite like that image. Although, I'm a little unsure as to what's happening here.

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We don't know why Dick's brain damage has changed him so dramatically.

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I think one has to think of the brain as a number of interactive modules and that some perhaps inhibit or suppress the function of other modules. And so if you knocked out a module that's main role was inhibitory, then you could have a gain of function of other parts of the brain.

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Maybe the disease has caused some widespread reorganization in the basic circuitry of Dick's brain. We can't yet say. The neural roots of creativity must be complex. Many other types of brain disease can also have striking effects on people's artistic imaginations.