A Defect That May Lead to a Masterpiece

In learning to draw or paint, it helps to have a sense of composition, color and originality.

And depth perception? Maybe not so much, neuroscientists are now suggesting. Instead, so-called stereo blindness — in which the eyes are out of alignment so the brain cannot fuse the images from each one — may actually be an asset.

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Dr. Livingstone and her colleagues first suspected a connection between artistic talent and stereo blindness when they examined 36 self-portraits by Rembrandt and found that his right eye was noticeably deviated in 35 of them. (That finding was published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2004.) They wondered how widespread the phenomenon might be.

The idea that some artists have a fundamental visual defect seems counterintuitive, said a co-author of both studies, Bevil R. Conway, a stereo-blind artist who teaches neuroscience at Wellesley College.

“But I always found it easy to draw,” he said, “not because of dexterity, but because when I looked at a scene the relative size and spatial relationships of objects seemed obvious and related immediately to their representation on a flat sheet of paper.”

An expert not involved in the new research, Susan R. Barry, a professor of neuroscience at Mount Holyoke College, said she thought the authors were “on to something.”

Dr. Barry is the author of “Fixing My Gaze” (Basic Books, 2009), an account of how she regained stereo vision at age 50 using vision therapy. “I have received hundreds of e-mails from people who are stereo blind, and it seems a disproportionate number are artists. Not being able to see in stereo might bias some people toward art.”

Ten percent of people develop various degrees of stereo blindness in early childhood because of visual defects that do not allow both eyes to line up, Dr. Barry said. Some have weak stereo that comes and goes with fatigue, while others completely lack what she calls the “palpable volumes of space” that come with stereo. Stereo-blind people learn to navigate by using monocular cues and never know what they are missing.