Puzzles of the Brain: An Artist's Journey Through Amnesia

In an effort to unlock the secrets of the brain and creativity, Johns Hopkins cognitive scientists are studying Lonni Sue Johnson, an artist who contracted viral encephalitis in 2007.
For more information, see http://releases.jhu.edu/2011/09/12/johns-hopkins-researchers-study-artistic-a...
Dr. Emma Gregory, a postdoctoral researcher in cognitive science at the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at The Johns Hopkins University, studied whether retrograde amnesia (loss of memory for information acquired before the onset of an illness or trauma) affected a broader range of knowledge than those tested in most previous studies of amnesia.
Her team's subject is a 62-year-old woman, LSJ, who was a very successful commercial artist before suffering a bout of viral encephalitis — which extensively damaged her temporal lobe — in 2007. In the study, Gregory's team explored potential differences between how the illness affected LSJ's everyday knowledge, such as commercial logos and famous people's faces, and expert knowledge, such as art and music that were peculiar to the subject's life.
They found severe impairment across all domains tested, suggesting that the temporal lobes may be critical for diverse forms of world knowledge and that the two categories of knowledge (everyday and expert) may not be distinct categories in memory.
The team's results lay a foundation for more detailed investigations into how the human brain stores world knowledge, and how this knowledge is disrupted when the brain is damaged.