Psychopathy and Art

Or rather, drawing...

Good lord, I looked for a drawing that would be appropriate to this post, specifically “little kid’s drawing”, and you would not believe the number of rather murdery images drawn by children. That is not at all what I was looking for, and yet I got results of such images in droves. It makes me wonder how many parents are raising their kids on a diet of horror movies, and how many kids lived through their family getting serial murdered.

Anyway, about the drawing above, I wanted an example of a pretty standard drawing done by a little kid. The one above does the job nicely. It’s pretty good for a kid, right? I agree, it is.

I can’t draw that.

I can’t draw at all. This has been the case my entire life. I have pretty well always known it because my artwork as a child never advanced past terrible. I would watch my mother (remember I am adopted there is no blood relation here) doodle away while she was on the phone, she is a pretty talented person creatively, and would think, hm, maybe when I get older I will be better at that.

Nope. Not even a little bit.

My brain sees the images just fine, but there is something missing in the translation of those images to my hand, and I entire lack the ability to reproduce them. I can reproduce them in writing very easily. In fact, that is a talent that I have always had. I can describe things in such detail that people feel like they can touch whatever it is I am telling them to see. Ask me to draw it though? Ha, you are wasting your time.

You have no idea how many people are utterly convinced that if they are the ones to teach me, then I would be able to draw. They have the missing piece. Nope, they don’t, my brain is the one that is missing the piece and unless they have a part of my brain, they aren’t going to fix whatever communication problem it has with this exercise.

Let me lay to rest your thoughts that you might be the Neo of the art world and can teach me to draw.

I have gone to art classes for over a year. No effect.

A friend of mine who is an artist learned to draw in later life and thought he would be able to teach me in the same manner he learned. Nope.

I have had numerous books given to me with different techniques. Didn’t work.

Have had personal tutoring by someone that is quite successful at selling his own work. Not only was he baffled by my inability, his incredible patience with me assured him that more time and different ways of trying to show me, there was no reason to continue.

Have had many artists suggest many things, and none of them have changed that inability. Let me be clear. I know that when you are learning something new, you will suck at it in the beginning. There is no other way about it. You have to teach your brain how to do whatever it is you want it to do. This has always been my approach to learning things, and have never thought that not being able to do something right away had any bearing on whether or not I could learn it at all.

When it comes to something that I want to do, putting in the time and effort is never an issue. If you have read me from the beginning you may remember the post detailing the Hollandaise sauce that I stubbornly tried to make over and over again until I ran out of ingredients. I am nothing if not stubborn, and that stubbornness can actually be a downfall for me. Such has been the case with drawing, but with this specific thing, time and effort make no difference.

Forever it will be that I cannot draw. Such is life, and no amount of differing techniques will change that, nor will there be a Neo of the art world that will be the “The One” who can see the Matrix of my brain and show me the way.

Recently I got a comment:

I keep hearing that psychopaths can't draw.  Why not?  That doesn't make a lot of sense to me.  I would think that maybe some psychopaths can't draw and some can, the same as any other people.  So why do some people insist they can't draw?  

This intrigued me, and I will tell you why. When I first started writing on Quora, there were a fair number of people writing in the psychopathy section. We sometimes compared notes, and found a few weird things that seemed to be the case for all of us.

1. We all stole food and hid it. None of us ever dealt with food scarcity, so this was not the source of this behavior. We just all had the habit of stealing and hiding food to eat later. I have no explanation regarding this, and none of us had any idea if it has anything to do with psychopathy, or if this was just a weird thing that coincidently we all did.

2. None of us could draw. All of us had the same issues with it. There was no problem with visualization, but the act of drawing never advanced past that of a child, and a rather rudimentary child at that.

Again, this could be anecdotal, but it is odd. Also interesting was the people that claimed psychopathy and could also draw, were also the ones that magically had another diagnosis later on. Those of us that had the diagnosis, however, none of us had the ability to draw.

The comment above interested me because prior to that comparison between us on Quora, I had never heard anything regarding psychopathy and the ability to draw. It certainly is interesting, but our similarities on the issue are hardly enough to come to a hard conclusion, but there appears to be some level of urban legend understanding that it is true that psychopaths cannot draw.

Through my time on Quora, I have met many different people that come from many different specialties in their resumes, and that has provided me the ability to ask them questions. This includes neuroscientists and neurologists, and the lack of ability to draw was one of the things that I asked a neuroscientist. His thoughts on the matter were interesting:

An inability to draw could be many things, but in what I term “soft neurological” cases like yours, I suspect it is a limited visuospatial deficit suggesting a delayed regional maturation.

BTW, that is just my opinion, not knowing you, and “delayed” and “maturation” are not derogatory terms when discussing issues like this.

Another thought he had:

Let me also add that the orbito-frontal cortex, while not directly implicated in psychopathy, can cause such things as difficulty in drawing and such, if it is the seat of a lesion.

He also talked about how he might design an experiment that would show how the psychopathic brain might handle the assigned task differently than a neurotypical. Through that comparison, it might be possible to understand if there is actually something about psychopathy and how it affects the brain that would cause this specific difference.

What would I “consider being a better mousetrap as it were?”

I would ask you. Such as, have a NT draw under the fMRI, and then have you. I believe that might be quite revealing. More than showing you stupid pictures. You have probably observed in yourself many more interesting phenomenon beside this. Those are worth looking at, with NTs as control.

All very interesting ideas, right? I think so, but I also think that it is important to remember that none of this has ever been looked at, and from what I know in research, there is no one that has considered whether psychopaths can draw or not, so they are not investigating this.

Perhaps in the future, someone with credentials and an fMRI machine will stumble on the discussions over on Quora between myself and the neuroscientist, or between all the psychopaths, and think that it is worth investigating, but for now, it is all an interesting thought. Nothing more.

I think it would be incorrect to allow the misconception that psychopaths are unable to draw to be a fact. It isn’t, and I would not want my writings on the matter to add to the incorrect conclusions being drawn. If our discussions on Quora about our ability to be outmatched by a child in the drawing arena created a myth about psychopathy, that is not something I would be pleased by. Debunking myths is what I would prefer to do, not muddying the water.