On Expansion: neurocognitive lessons from the elderly

Drawing by Hazel.

The intelligence of the body and the way this intelligence operates independently of our controlled, rational thinking, was shown to me clearly today. I spent my morning leading an art activity at a local nonprofit private residence for elderly women. They are in their 90s and in various stages of "neurocognitive disorder". Our activity, which was to be pinhole art, began with drawing. These ladies met the challenge of filling a blank page with a variety of responses, some heart-wrenching. Two ladies simply dozed off in their chairs, another slowly traced a piece of lace to make a pattern, and one sighed, "Oh dear, oh dear", stumped by what to possibly draw, concerning herself instead with a peeling edge on the surface of the work table, continuing to repeat, "Oh dear, oh dear" as she picked at it. Another lady sat repeating that she just wasn't good at anything. Hazel, perhaps most advanced in age and who had been an artist earlier in life, simply began and followed the green pencil movements with a detached interest, clicking her dentures together in her mouth absentmindedly. When I asked her what she was drawing, she informed me it was just what she saw. She sat off a little by herself, physically requiring more space in order to accommodate her needs and so I worked at the main table and checked in with her every five or ten minutes. The above drawing is what she produced. I noticed her looking at the cuff of her sleeve a lot as she drew.

Hazel had been somewhat cranky and demanding when she first came into the room, wanting to know what was going on. We were introduced and she sat down, mumbling with irritation, somewhat incoherent. Fifteen minutes into her drawing, Hazel transformed. I asked her if she had been drawing the pattern on the cuff of her sleeve and she said, surprised, "No!" Then she explained it.
She began to express the most eloquent thoughts to me, about how every experience is an expansion and how it took her till old age to realize that she could feel and experience multiple things at once, both physically and emotionally. When I asked her what she meant by expansion, she expanded her mouth into a wide smile and said, "Just like that." She asked me to feel her body in order to understand what her drawing meant: to run my hand along the bottom of her back to 'see' the thickening of the lines she'd drawn, to feel her hands and how they progressed from cool to colder across to her smallest finger. The lines in her drawing, changing in thickness, represented 'expansion' of experience as well as her fingers and spine. The thickest line, she told me, was her spine. She showed me how she moved her body to adjust her spine, to expand it, in order to alleviate the pain there. She spoke about how movement was expansion, and experience was expressed through movement, of her pencil, of her body, of her awareness. Hazel's lucid thinking was profound and I am not doing it justice here, because I can't put it together quite like she did. She kept telling me that this was a wonderful experience, that it was fun, but importantly, not silly, just very fun. I asked her to explain to me the difference between fun and silly, and she explained it thus: "Think of a lady getting dressed to go out. She dresses for fun. Now think of how this is different if she dresses to be silly." Point made. When Hazel finished her drawing and telling me everything she had to offer, I began to clean up the paper and pencils and other supplies. She quickly lapsed into an incoherent state, repeating as if a mantra: "mama mia mama mia mama mia", punctuated by other utterances that were not words at all, but something like grunt/screeches. I was astonished at the switch.

Here is what the woman who kept saying, "Oh dear, oh dear" eventually put down on paper as her drawing:

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? TO HISTORY?

What I witnessed with these ladies was a profound transformation from a general cognitive detachment from physical 'reality' as we understand it, to an expressive, almost automatic 'voice' that emerged when their creativity was engaged. The messages from the body and the abstract conceptualization of those messages through art moved me very deeply. Listening to Hazel's articulation of her 'movement', physically, artistically and in terms of her self-awareness and expansion, as all interconnected and multidimensional while also very simple, was like hearing the voice of a truly expanded being speaking to me from somewhere greater. It was, for me, not so much that these ladies were "neurocognitively disordered" but perhaps existing in an expanded neurocognition, one expressed best through the voice of the body and creative channels. When I told Hazel that she was speaking my language, she smiled hugely, clapped her hands and said, "Yes."