Has Parkinson's affected your creativity?

I notice a few people are saying that having Parkinson's has affected their creativity, either that they have become more creative or have become creative for the first time. A good example can be found in the message that JustStrummin posted (Any shakey musicians out there? http://bit.ly/T4XWnq). Does everyone feel like that? I also note that some people refer to the compulsive nature of their creative ouputs, again is this something that other forum members are experiencing? It would be interesting to hear people's views and experiences.
hi

As a tutor of art & design for 20 years i was creative in my head and got excited about it but gave it all away to students and had little time to do any myself or energy to do it when i got home. Sometimes a change was better and a long walk at the weekend needed to refresh ready for Monday.
The difference now is that there's all day if i want and even all week and that means i get to develop ideas, too. Proportionally i spend a big % of my time creatively now.
"Bounce" by Matthew Syed is about "the myth of talent and the power of practice". that is, anyone can become an expert by applying themselves - specifically 10,000 hours of practice in a concentrated time schedule. He argues that Mozart was not a prodigy but was made to practice unusually often for a child to make him so much better than others of his age.

i believe everyone has a creative side but it gets put away in our society because there's not much call for it when you're working at tesco's, in the accountants office, earning money

aren't we lucky?!!

maker
That is a very good point, maker, and I think that that might be true in many cases. But I genuinely believe that PD does something to creativity itself. I began to write poetry and music while still working as a teacher - not a lot of spare time there! I had always written little ditties for my guitar pupils, but I found that I began to develop these ideas in a way that I had not done before. I wonder whether this is connected with the emotional element in PD.
hi justStrummin
Not sure what you mean by the emotional element of PD? but i try to remind myself regularly (often said by my PD nurse and consultant) that not everything can be referred back to Parkinsons, other things still happen to us as well. Certainly , i can be quite obsessively single-minded when i'm creating - though i probably was before. I'm also slower and can't do the fiddly handling that i once did all the time so inevitably the nature of the work will have to change gradually. For me, a successful creative day is a day when i haven't got PD.

maker
Hi everyone - on the subect of PD/creativity - a while ago I put some notes together for consideration at a DENDRON research event. The topic was not adopted for further investigation but I'm happy to make my document available to anyone who is interested. Is it pissible to attach it to a pist? Or make it available to forum members in some other way? Cheers

Alif
Thanks for offering to share that, that sounds interesting. Is it a Word document? and is it very long? I think I'm right in saying that you'd have two options 1. offer to send it to anyone who asks you for it - but you'd have to agree to share emails to do that, or 2. Copy and paste the text into a post, but then it would need to be not too long or have any significant formatting I think, the forum posts just offer basic text formatting. Perhaps if Ezinda, the Forum Administrator is watching, she can confirm what I've said or let us know if there is another way.
if anyone is interested there's an old book, once looked upon as a how to "bible", called Drawing from the right side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. I can't remember it's content but the premise was about learning to think in a particular way to learn to draw. - reading it again now knowing what i know about PD might be interesting?

maker
HI there maker,

By emotional element I mean the fact that the parts of the brain which have been damaged in PD (ie the areas affecting movement and coordination) are right next to those governing emotion. That's why you shake after or during an emotional trauma or shock :frowning:, or why some people shake when angry:imp:. Many of my friends with PD have also commented on feeling more 'emotional' since the beginning of their PD symptoms :confused:.
How do I get these damn emoticons to work??!!!