Posts tagged literature
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Shakespeare and Wordsworth boost the brain, new research reveals
Scientists, psychologists and English academics at Liverpool University have found that reading the works of the Bard and other classical writers has a beneficial effect on the mind, catches the reader’s attention and triggers moments of self-reflection.
Using scanners, they monitored the brain activity of volunteers as they read works by William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, T.S Eliot and others.
They then “translated” the texts into more “straightforward”, modern language and again monitored the readers’ brains as they read the words.
Scans showed that the more “challenging” prose and poetry set off far more electrical activity in the brain than the more pedestrian versions.
Scientists were able to study the brain activity as it responded to each word and record how it “lit up” as the readers encountered unusual words, surprising phrases or difficult sentence structure.
This “lighting up” of the mind lasts longer than the initial electrical spark, shifting the brain to a higher gear, encouraging further reading.
The research also found that reading poetry, in particular, increases activity in the right hemisphere of the brain, an area concerned with “autobiographical memory”, helping the reader to reflect on and reappraise their own experiences in light of what they have read. The academics said this meant the classics were more useful than self-help books.
Philip Davis, an English professor who has worked on the study with the university’s magnetic resonance centre, will tell a conference this week: “Serious literature acts like a rocket-booster to the brain.
"The research shows the power of literature to shift mental pathways, to create new thoughts, shapes and connections in the young and the staid alike."
Pursuing literary immortality illuminates how the mind works
The initial excitement of hearing a new song fades as it’s replayed to death. That’s because the brain naturally functions as a kind of ticking time bomb, obliterating the thrill of artistic sounds, images and words by making them familiar over time.
So the artist, musician or author’s challenge is to create a work that retains its freshness, according to Case Western Reserve University’s Michael Clune in his new book Writing Against Time (Stanford University Press). And, for the artist, musician or writer, creating this newness with each work is a race against “brain time.”
In his book, Clune explained how neurobiological forces designed for our survival naturally make interest in art fade. But the forces don’t stop artists from trying for timelessness.
While the phenomenon is true for all art, the assistant professor of English focused on the intersection of literature and science, describing what writers can do to block or slow that natural erosion over time. Clune builds on his interest in how the brain destroys a lasting enjoyment of art. He has written about and reported on the topic in the neuroscience journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
The brain gradually defeats that initial excitement with boredom, which Clune described as “this dull feeling that your senses have died.”
As writers fight to ward off the reader’s boredom with striking new forms, metaphors and images, the brain works just as fast to extinguish it.
“We are evolutionarily designed so that we focus on new objects and ignore familiar ones,” Clune said. “When the mind confronts a new object, our perception is intense and vivid, but it soon dies with familiarity. Every minute, this feeling fades as the mind grasps the object.”