Post date: Apr 21, 2017 7:01:23 PM
For high schoolers, Shakespeare is the stuff of nightmares. Although English, his flowery, indirect language seems foreign. His five hundred year old characters and plots seem completely unrelated to today's world, right?
Wrong!
According to the psychologists at Liverpool University, reading Shakespeare is beneficial to the brain.
In their experiment, psychologists gave thirty volunteers excerpts from Shakespeare's Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear in their original text and in a modern translation. The scientists were able to monitor the volunteers’ brain activity, studying how the brain lit up as people read the two different texts.
The results showed that the original text spiked brain activity much more than the “dumbed-down” version, in part because of the texts’ web of complicated sentences and unusual word choices.
The Bard's success in stimulating brain activity is largely due to his use of functional shift, a linguistic style in which one part of speech functions as another. Functional shift forces the brain to work backwards to determine the function and definition of a word, causing a sudden spike in brain activity.
Professor Philip Davis, from the 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 by 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.”
Experts, such as Professor Philip Davis, also believe that the use of functional shift helps account for the intrigue that encourages people to read just one more page of Shakespearean play.
According to The Telegraph, researchers also discovered 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.”
When volunteers read a piece of classic poetry translated into modern English, the left portion of their brains connected to language lit up. However, when they read poetry in its original form, both the left portion and the right portion, which is connected directly to the autobiographical memory and emotion, became engaged.
This intense brain activity indicates that reading poetry and other works of classic literature stimulates the reappraisal mechanisms, which as the name suggests, prompts the reader to reflect on his or her past actions and rethink past decisions.
Dr. Davis says that “This is the argument for serious language in serious literature for serious human situations, instead of self-help books or the easy reads that merely reinforce predictable opinions and conventional self-images.”
-Michael Bachmann