Can I draw something for youwhat should I draw? Lonni Sue Johnson asked,but didnt wait for an answer. She drew a squiggly line that became a curly halo of hair around the cheerful face of a seated man stretching one leg upward,balancing a large bird on his foot. Within minutes,she had added a cat wearing a necklace,stars and a tiny,grinning airplane. I like this part,because you want people to be happy, she said,beaming. Johnson,61,is an artist and illustrator whose playful,bright-hued and often complex work has appeared in a wide array of publications,from the cover of The New Yorker to childrens books to murder mysteries to The New York Timeseven a physics textbook. All that changed in December 2007,when she was stricken with viral encephalitis,a life-threatening disease that did severe damage to parts of her brainincluding the hippocampus,where new memories are formed. She survived,but remembered little about her life before the illness. Yet she is able to make art,though it is simpler and more childlike than her professional work. Her case is rare,experts say,because few accomplished artists continue to create after sustaining severe brain damage. Now scientists at Johns Hopkins University hope she can help them answer longstanding questions: What parts of the brain are needed for creativity? As Michael McCloskey,a professor of cognitive science at Hopkins,put it,Johnsons case raises interesting questions about identity: Here youve lost an awful lot of what makes you who you arewhats left for art? But you see in her art shes very much the same person, he continued. She is not an empty shell. There is something about your identity thats distinct from memory. A small exhibit of Johnsons works from before and after her illness opened recently at the Walters Museum in Baltimore. The museums website,thewalters.org,includes a video about Johnson. It helps that Johnsons brain damage was limited to discrete lesions rather than being diffuse or pervasive,the scientists say. Her memory loss was not like the amnesia of movies and pulp novels: She knew who she was,and she recognised her mother,Margaret Kennard Johnson,an artist in her own right,and her sister. But she did not remember key events in her life. She did not know she had been married for 10 years,and she has had to be told several times her father died,though it happened nearly two decades before her illness. Her family has filled her in on most of the details,so she now knows she was a professional artist,that she used to play the violin,viola,guitar and piano,and owned and flew airplanes. But she cannot recall or describe specific episodes in her life,and was surprised last week,when her sister reminded her that she had once lived in a penthouse apartment with a garden in Manhattan,and taught art classes. At the beginning of her recovery,she had to relearn how to walk,talk and eat,her sister said. She did not recognise purple,black and orange,and could not put pen to paper. But her mother,who had been her mentor as an artist,brought her back to art. Two months after she was taken ill,her mother took a green marker and drew a triangle; the younger woman took a blue marker and copied it. They kept doing that until the page was filled with shapes,and then Lonni Sue Johnson sketched a few small human figures,something like the ones she had drawn before her illness; they were dancing around the shapes on the page,embracing them and pulling them together. Johnson has an outstanding vocabularyon tests,despite damage to the front of the temporal lobe,a part of the brain considered the semantic hub and associated with language,McCloskey said. When she was asked by researchers to copy a complicated drawing,she quickly drew a nearly perfect replica. But she cannot hold the image in her mind: When the picture was turned upside down and she was asked to draw it again a moment later,she had forgotten what it was. In another striking test that raises more questions about memory,identity and art,researchers inserted one of her own paintings in a stack of postcards showing paintings by famous artists,and asked her to identify them. When she sees her own work,she recognises it immediately as her own. RONI CARYN RABIN
