scipsy:This is Your Brain on ShakespeareIn the past, most brain experiments would involve the study
scipsy:This is Your Brain on ShakespeareIn the past, most brain experiments would involve the study of defects, and use a lack of health in the brain to show what it can do. Professor Philip Davis from the University of Liverpool’s School of English is approaching brain research in a different way. He is studying what he calls “functional shifts” that demonstrate how Shakespeare’s creative mistakes “shift mental pathways and open possibilities” for what the brain can do. It is Shakespeare’s inventions—particularly his deliberate syntactic errors like changing the part of speech of a word—that excite us, rather than confuse us. With the aid of brain imaging scientists, Davis conducted neurolinguistic experiments investigating sentence processing in the brain. The experiments showed that when people are wired they have different reactions to hearing different types of sentences. One type of measured brain responses is called an M400, which occurs 400 milliseconds after the brain experiences a thought or perception. This is considered a normal response. On the other hand, a P600 response indicates a peak in brain activity 600 milliseconds after the brain experiences a quite different type of thought or perception. Davis describes the P600 response as the “Wow Effect,” in which the brain is excited, and is put in “a state of hesitating consciousness.” […]But how is poetic language different from normal language? Consider these examples, in which Shakespeare grammatically shifts the function of words:An adjective is made into a verb: ‘thick my blood’ (The Winter’s Tale) A pronoun is made into a noun: ‘the cruellest she alive’ (Twelfth Night)A noun is made into a verb: ‘He childed as I fathered’ (King Lear)As Davis’s experiments have shown, instead of rejecting these “syntactic violations,” the brain accepts them, and is excited by the “grammatical oddities” it is experiencing. While it has not been fully proven that we can localize which parts of the brain process nouns as opposed to verbs, Davis says his research suggests that “in the moment of hesitation” brought on by the stimulative effects of functional shift, the brain doesn’t know “what part to assign the word to.”[…] For Davis, we need creative language “to keep the brain alive.” […] (via Big Think) -- source link