Development of uncontrollable artistic urges has been documented in medical case studies. One 41-year-old woman with Parkinson's disease who began taking levodopa developed what neurologists called a "devastating addiction to painting." Her home became a gathering place for artists, and she began compulsively buying painting materials. She described the spiral earlier this year in a medical journal: "I started painting from morning till night, and often all through the night until morning. I used countless numbers of brushes at a time. I used knives, forks, sponges … I would gouge open tubes of paint–it was everywhere. But I was still in control at that point. Then, I started painting on the walls, the furniture, even the washing machine. I would paint any surface I came across. I also had my 'expression wall' and I could not stop myself from painting and repainting [it] every night in a trance-like state. My partner could no longer bear it. People close to me realized that I crossed some kind of line into the pathological, and, at their instigation, I was hospitalized. Today, my doctors have succeeded in getting my medication under control, and my creativity has become more tranquil and structured."

So Inzelberg’s current study tested for symptoms of impulse control disorder, as well as creativity—which it did in a variety of ways. One exam asked people to mention as many different words beginning with a certain letter and in a certain category as possible. In a remote association test, people were given three words and had to name a fourth. Another test required interpretation of abstract images and assessed imaginative answers to questions like, "What can you do with sandals?" Subjects were also asked to interpret novel metaphors.

In the end, there was no relationship between the creativity Inzelberg has been noticing and any degree of compulsive behavior.

The patients with Parkinson’s disease did significantly better than their unafflicted peers in terms of verbal and visual creativity, divergent thinking and combinational novelty.

“We also found that patients taking higher doses of dopaminergic medication had more creative answers,” Inzelberg said.

“These results support a genuine change in neuropsychological processes underlying creativity,” the Annals study concluded. That’s of interest not just to Parkinson’s patients, but an entire field of neurobiology grasping at an understanding of the chemical processes that fuel the so-desired trait.

A possible mechanism mediating the relationship between dopamine and creativity is known as novelty-seeking behavior, a tendency linked to neural areas like the ventral striatum, substantia nigra, and hippocampus, that are especially modulated by dopamine. It has been proposed that an increased in novelty seeking only occurs in Parkinson’s patients with impulse-control disorder, though, which this study did not find, suggesting that creativity is not (solely) an expression of obsessive creative drive or enhanced productivity brought about by medication.