Your brain on Shakespeare
p2pnet.net OT News:- The Bard is Good for your Brain, say researchers at the University of Liverpool in England.
They were investigating whether, "wrestling with the innovative use of language could help to prevent dementia," says The Times Online, going on:
"Monitoring participants with brain-imaging equipment, they found that certain lines from Shakespeare and other great writers such as Chaucer and Wordsworth caused the brain to spark with electrical activity because of the unusual words or sentence structure."
Shakespeare used functional shift, a linguistic technique that involves, for example, using a noun to serve as a verb, says Science Daily, and, "The researchers found that technique allows the brain to understand what a word means before it understands the function of the word within a sentence. And the process causes a sudden peak in brain activity, forcing the brain to work backwards to understand what Shakespeare was trying to say.
It quotes professor Philip Davis as saying, "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."
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Also See:
The Times Online – ‘Tis nobler in the mind to read Shakespeare, December 19, 2006
Science Daily – Reading Shakespeare excites the brain, December 19, 2006
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