What Happened to Nadia? Cave Art, Autism and the Creative Process

In 1999 Nicholas Humphreys published an article where he put forward his hypothesis that “language was absent in the general population of human beings living in Europe 30,000 years ago”[1]. He cites the remarkable drawings of an autistic savant called Nadia Chomyn from Nottingham, England, born in 1967 who was unable to speak or otherwise communicate (she is described as being “mentally defective” and “severely retarded)  but despite this, or inspite of this, could draw extraordinary representations of animals and humans from memory, from the age of 3 to 9, a skill which supposedly became less profound as she learnt to speak. His conclusion was that language was not vital for artistic ability and indeed perhaps language inhibited those skills, and that therefore, the cave paintings did not have to be the result of a modern mind as had been previously thought. The skills of Nadia are pivotal in his argument.

I came across the story of Nadia when studying for my M.A. World Art History in 2005 from my then supervisor John Onians who would often refer to the child Nadia, who was in some ways, famous; there had been articles written about her, a book published on her, and even a documentary film made. Artists too had seen the brilliance in her work, Graham Sutherland said “The drawings strike me as being very remarkable indeed from many points of view ... not least for the extraordinary precision displayed.”.

From what I remember from our conversations, John Onians, saw the connection of a child who could automatically and spontaneously draw without being taught, and without having language and other neurotypical brains functions, with the prehistoric artist who walked into a cave and (according to his thesis) spontaneously produced extraordinary art, again without being tutored or taught, and also without the modern mind of language, syntax etc. It implies a more neurological, even animal-like process rather than the sophisticated processes we would normally associate with the production of “art”. I have to say that I rather liked the neatness of the neurological explanation.

Twenty years later, I find myself still intrigued in this paper, and the possible neurological basis of the creative process. For me, the paper inspires in me a line of thought, even though it argues against it, the possibility that autism played a part in the origins of art in prehistory. This to me is an interesting window into the creative process, with this process being a neurological pathway which is inherently neurodiverse, rather than saying that a lack of language could predispose a high level of art.

It brings me back to the statement by the Neurobiologist Semir Zeki, that:

“Artists [and musicians] are neurologists, studying the brain with techniques that are unique to them”[2]

Are artists and musicians’ brains wired differently? They cannot all be autistic of course…or can they? It is a spectrum after all…

In my mind there must be some sort of neurodiversity at play with the great artists and musicians and I can’t help thinking that Leonardo’s inability to finish many of the projects that he worked on, and his apparent loathing of certain aspects of humanity, and his love of animals puts him in the autistic spectrum, perhaps with attention deficit.

Leonardo’s creative ability worked on the same process of the cave paintings, Leonardo would sketch over and over again on the same piece of paper, and in the jumbled incoherent mess, pick out a composition to refine; whilst the prehistoric artist may well have seen animals in the convoluted shadowy walls of the caves which helped to inspire them.

Then again Leonardo may be the exception rather than the rule, just as Nadia was the exception rather than the rule, and maybe the artist of Chauvet Cave was too. Perhaps they were just all unique individuals in which we glimpse in a sort snap-shot of history. 

In terms of the cave paintings and Humphrey’s paper, I don’t think we can categorically disprove the existence of language in prehistory at the time of the cave paintings, but I think the link between neurodiversity and creative genius compelling – not just for academic research into the origins of art and for art history, but how we teach and support the neurodiverse children in our neurotypical world.

Getting back to Nadia and what happened to her. Despite the international interest, Nadia’s extraordinary drawing abilities declined as she grew older and she lived the rest of her life quietly in residential accommodation, supervised and supported, unable to live independently. She died in 2015 at the age of 48. Her drawings, perhaps valued more for their scientific worth rather then their value as art, are kept in a Hospital Museum and Archive in London [3]. And that, for some reason, makes me sad.

But perhaps my own autistic brain function and my sensitivity to neurodiversity makes me feel somewhat protective of her, she is part of the same spectrum that I exist in after-all, and perhaps I feel somewhat guilty too, that I used her as an example in a blog, as a scientific subject, and only at the end of writing this remembered her humanity and asked myself the important question: what actually happened to Nadia?

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[1] Humphrey N (1999) Cave Art, Autism, and the Human Mind in the Journal of Consciousness Studies Vol.6 (1999) Ed. By Joseph Goguen, Imprint Academic

[2] Zeki S (1999) Art and the Brain in the Journal of Consciousness Studies Vol.6 (1999) Ed. By Joseph Goguen, Imprint Academic. [The addition of “musicians” is from a personal communication in 2005]

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/dec/09/nadia-chomyn

Power Animals, Caveman, Bear Feet and Bare Foot Running

It all went rather wrong after I had done some sports visualization called Self Hypnosis and Cognitive Sports Psychology that I had read about in a running mag where you focus on being like a specific animal. I thought. "Well a horse runs rather well - I will focus on that". If you imagine the Leonardo drawing as a human leg then you can see where I was coming from.

Basically what I’m getting at is the horse runs on a finger, with the metatarsal stretched out as a limb and the Talus acts as a joint. Horses don’t get shinsplints and plantar fasciitis and they don’t wear cushioned trainers. With this in mind I started to run more on my toes, and then, as I started to strain my calf muscles, and got a stabbing pain in my left buttock I realized that perhaps humans aren't like horses at all.

As I limped about and tried to stretch my hamstrings on the kitchen table I thought to myself that If I couldn’t run like a horse, and I certainly couldn’t run like a cat (with those Puma Mobiums runnng shoes which are modeled on a cat’s paw) then what animal could I empathize with in such a manner? The first animal one might say is a Chimpanzee which is our closest animal cousin, and this is where it gets interesting.  
  

With which animal does the human foot share the most similarities?  

It isn’t a Chimpanzee. They have feet which have a big toe much like a thumb which enables them to manipulate objects with their feet and climb trees.

The surprising answer is a bear. I don’t think this was lost on Leonardo who did more than one study of a bear’s leg much in the fashion that he had studied human anatomy.

And this is where it gets interesting. In one of the earliest caves in which pictorial art survives, called Chauvet Cave (France), about thirty thousand years old, we find a great gallery of prehistoric art of various animals, but also there is a bear skull placed upon a fallen stalactite, and believed to have been the centre of some form of veneration. Furthermore, not only did bears at one time live in that cave, the first marks upon that clay covered wall was by a bear. The implication is that the bear and the bear claw marks inspired prehistoric man to paint at this site. At Chauvet Cave at least, the Bear and Man is somehow linked in the Prehistoric Mind.

We can further this thought by looking at the petraglyphs of the Native Americans from New Mexico, who also seem to venerate - amongst other animals - the bear. In these following photos you will see first of all carvings of the human foot followed by a carving of a bear foot.

They do not make a direct comparison of course, yet one can imagine the significance of the human foot print just as we can imagine the significance of the hand. The fact that the Native Americans also venerated the bear, just as the prehistoric hunter/gatherers who painted the cave at Chauvet did, makes me wonder whether the traditions of the Native Americans extend further back into history than we may realize, just as the Australian Aborigines do. The culture of the Australian Aborigines are thought to reach back some 50,000 yrs ago...if we apply the same time span to the Native Americans we would place them - not in their ancestral home of America - but living across the entire Eurasian continent (somewhat restricted of course by the glaciers of the ice age). With this in mind perhaps it is not strange that there is a sort of harmony between the rock of art of prehistoric Europe and that of the America.

I of course digress - but not I believe too much. Feet, foot prints and the bear foot print, and the very human act of bipedal running is all somehow linked. Horse riding after all is a relatively new invention, perhaps a few thousand years old in Europe and only a few hundred years in America. Before we rode horses we found other ways of locomotion, and our feet were our only means of travel.

Fight, Flight and Freeze: The Deer is my Teacher

I remember my first day as a postgraduate, about 15 years ago at university, all was going well until the "meet and greet buffet" with students and faculty staff, which to neurotypical people is fairly normal, enjoyable even, but for me, as a neurodivergent, was surprisingly difficult. I felt an increasing sense of unease, of being overwhelmed. Sweaty. On the verge of panic. I hadn’t realised just how socially awkward I was. I got through the buffet by retreating into a safe place in my mind, and then with about four hours to spare before the next event, as all the other students left the buffet and further mingled, I disappeared into the background, through a hole in the hedge and found the River, and walked along it as far as I could, until the city was behind me and my vista was the opening fields of the countryside. Like a deer escaping a predator my heart beat started to return to normal and I could feel that I could once more breathe again. Years later I would refer to this flight reaction as my own peculiar ‘deer-sense’.

In my mind, our animal nature is most prevalent in our symptoms of anxiety and depression and hypervigilance, which can be more pronounced in those with neurodiversity, and which evolved over countless millennia, even millions of years. It is these emotional responses and alterations in our mental health that constitutes our survival sense – that keeps us alert and safe in a dangerous world – just like a prey animal such as the deer. We have probably all seen this when we happen across a deer who startles and bounds away into the forest, or when we see a rabbit in our headlights and they just freeze, or a horse that starts kicking to rid them of their rider and saddle. Well, we do the same. We may freeze or we may run, and in some circumstances we may fight. But we do all these things in an animalistic way, and if we do react it will be in a frenzied, automatic, uncontained and uncontrolled way, with one purpose; to save our life – but with no finesse, with no exactness or accuracy and with no sense of impeccability or precision. 

In many situations in life this fight/flight/freeze reaction is neither helpful nor empowering; it leaves us vulnerable, ridiculed and in a weakened position. For example, if we get called into the manager’s office for a ‘chat’ – perhaps we haven’t done something right or we are to be criticised – we will not be able to respond calmly or rationally if we are in the fight / flight / freeze response; because this is a survival mechanism which uses parts of the brain which are very animal-like in form and function – it as if we put a wild deer in the manager’s office. That wild deer isn’t going to be happy it’s going to try and smash the window to escape. So, if we are feeling like that, feeling fearful of attack, it’s just not going to go well for us, as the manager’s office is not a life or death situation, and if we start reacting like a scared animal it’s just going to go from bad to worse. We will act like a prey animal, we will be a rabbit in the head lights, and we will not handle ourselves very competently. It all stems from how our brains are structured.

If we consider the brain as an onion with different layers, the upper layers, the neocortex deals with our higher-thinking, such as sensory perception, language and conscious thought, and frontal lobes deals with the attributes that make us both individual and ‘human’ – emotional expression, personality and our ability to communicate. As we go deeper into the brain – a little like looking at the growth rings inside a tree – we find brain structures which are old, primordial in fact, linking to our evolutionary past; the limbic system, which emerged in early primates and dealing with motivation, and emotions such as anxiety; and deeper still the brain stem, also called the reptilian brain, which controls our basic functions such as breathing, swallowing, heart rate and blood pressure. It is the centre of the brain that humans use when we are depressed, stressed, suffer from heightened states of anxiety, or are in the fight / flight / freeze response. In this state we may start to exhibit quite antisocial qualities, autistic spectrum qualities even – not wanting to be touched, not wanting to leave our safe place, not wanting to talk or to interact and so on, most probably caused by reduction of serotonin, the feel good chemical. Likewise, when the adrenalin kicks in and makes us physically react, we may react aggressively and fight or lash out or we may run, again this injection of adrenalin into our system is a survival response.

Putting ourselves into our proper context as animals, reframes our co-relationship with the animal kingdom, even leaning us towards a Native American point of view – not seeing animals as ‘other’ and lower, and ‘us’ as higher and better, but rather as them as four-leggeds and us as two-leggeds; more like cousins in a big interlocking family than wholly different and separate. 

I suppose you could say that the deer has been a great teacher to me over the years. I have learnt about my own highly attuned ‘autistic’ senses from the deer, and how my anxiety reduces, and even disappears entirely, when I am in the woods and countryside. I have learnt how to walk quietly and deer-like through the woods, even to fully allow this deer-sense to take over when it is appropriate to do so. On some occasions I have been known to go through a hole in the hedge and into a field just to get away from approaching humans, and using this sense I naturally find myself near to the deer herd and other wildlife. But I also have learnt when this deer-sense is no longer appropriate and when I need to control it, when I need to steer myself away from fight or flight, because sometimes running away is not an option. I have embraced my autistic traits as my 'deer sense', it has its use as a super-sense and it has its disadvantages too. But I have come to terms that 'this is me.'