Brainy Bard
The Bard may be more exciting that people realise
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Tuesday, 19, Dec 2006 12:26
Shakespeare's works are able to "surprise" the brain by using unexpected and exciting linguistic techniques, according to a new study.
Many school children may claim that reading the Bard's numerous plays and poems is fairly tedious, but researchers from the University of Liverpool argue that though pupils may not realise it, their brains are becoming excited.
Professor Neil Roberts and Professor Philip Davis, together with Dr Guillaune Thierry from the University of Wales, Bangor, monitored brain responses in 20 people reading Shakespeare using a scanner called an electroencephalogram (EEG).
They found that a technique known as 'functional shift' – where, for example, a noun serves as a verb – allows the brain to understand what a word means before it understands the word's meaning in a sentence.
This sparks a sudden peak of activity in the brain, forcing it to work backwards in order to work out the meaning behind Shakespeare's words.
Professor Philip Davis, from Liverpool University's school of English, said: "The brain reacts to reading a phrase such as 'he godded me' from the tragedy of Coriolanus, in a similar way to putting a jigsaw puzzle together.
"If it is easy to see which pieces slot together you become bored of the game, but if the pieces don't appear to fit, when we know they should, the brain becomes excited. By throwing odd words into seemingly normal sentences, Shakespeare surprises the brain and catches it off guard in a manner that produces a sudden burst of activity - a sense of drama created out of the simplest of things."
And explaining the science behind the study, Professor Roberts added: "EEG gives graph-like measurements and when the brain reads a sentence that does not make semantic sense it registers what we call a N400 effect – a negative wave modulation.
"When the brain reads a grammatically incorrect sentence it registers a P600 effect – an effect which continues to last after the word that triggered it was first read."
The research team are now conducting studies with magnetoencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging to test which areas of the brain are most affected and the kind of impact it could have in maintaining healthy brain activity.
"This interdisciplinary work is good for brain science because it offers permanent scripts of the human mind working moment-to-moment," Professor Davis added. "It is good for literature as it illustrates primary human thinking. Through the two disciplines, we may discover new insights into the very motions of the mind."