Apparently reading Shakespeare and other classics activates different parts of the brain than other kinds of literature. A colaboration between neuroscientists and humanities researchers at the University of Liverpool has found that the use of a functional shift, when a word takes on a new syntactic role, incites the brain in interesting ways. From the press release,

Professor Neil Roberts, from the University’s Magnetic Resonance and Image Analysis Research Centre, (MARIARC), explains: “The effect on the brain is a bit like a magic trick; we know what the trick means but not how it happened. Instead of being confused by this in a negative sense, the brain is positively excited. The brain signature is relatively uneventful when we understand the meaning of a word but when the word changes the grammar of the whole sentence, brain readings suddenly peak. The brain is then forced to retrace its thinking process in order to understand what it is supposed to make of this unusual word.”

Sadly, there’s never any mention of a publication in a peer reviewed journal, or of the kind of controls run, or what exactly they mean by “positive brain activity,” but it would be interesting if certain authors or certain styles induce different responses that can be measured by FMRI. Of course, this Telegraph article tries to spin it as a reason children should be reading more Shakespeare, even though I imagine this kind of linguistic technique could be found in all sorts of different kinds of literature. The kind of interpretive thinking this requires is also something people probably do when they enter a new digital environment with its own lingo, like a new game or bboard. Kids should read more Shakespeare, of course, just maybe not because of this.

Via The Affected Provincial’s Almanack