Iris Murdoch, winner of the Booker Prize in 1978, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease two years after the publication of her 26th novel. She’d complained of writer’s block while working on Jackson’s Dilemma, which apparently was a symptom of the early stages of Alzheimer’s during which sufferers struggle to express their thoughts.

In an analysis of Murdoch’s writing, Peter Garrard, a neuroscientist at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in London, found that her writing became “more pedestrian and her vocabulary shrank.”

See how much her writing changed from her first novel, Under The Net, 1954:

So you may imagine how unhappy it makes me to have to cool my heels at Newhaven, waiting for the trains to run again, and with the smell of France still fresh in my nostrils. On this occasion, too, the bottles of cognac, which I always smuggle, had been taken from me by the Customs, so that when closing time came I was utterly abandoned to the torments of a morbid self-scrutiny.

To her last novel, Jackson’s Dilemma, 1995:

His beautiful mother had died of cancer when he was 10. He had seen her die. When he heard his father’s sobs he knew. When he was 18, his younger brother was drowned. He had no other siblings. He loved his mother and his brother passionately. He had not got on with his father. His father, who was rich and played at being an architect, wanted Edward to be an architect too. Edward did not want to be an architect.

I wonder how other diseases of the mind and body affect creativity.

Psychology Today, September/October 2005