Phil Davis has taught generations of students how to read and understand Shakespeare, one
of the most challenging and innovative writers in the world literature.
Phil became fascinated by what was sparked inside his brain when he’s encountered some
of Shakespeare’s more testing inventions.
‘A father,’ says this speaker, ‘a gracious aged man have you madded.’
Not ‘made mad’, but that suddenly electrical charges of turning of what it is an adjective
into a verb at one shot.
We’ll look at this one from Coriolanus.
Coriolanus says: This last old man, whom with a cracked heart I have sent to Rome, giving
him no favors, loved me above the measure of a father, nay, godded me even.
Now this time, we formed a verb not from an adjective, but from a noun.
And I put it to you, that is more primal, more exciting, more electric than ‘divined
me’, the Latin word, or ‘made a god of me’.
This is sudden compressed electric.
Having felt these all visceral phrase, reading Shakespear, what made you turned to scientists
to…
Wanting to know more about what is happening to me.
This is not unusual in the play itself, in Lear.
Lear grabbed hold of his head: Oh, Lear, Lear, Lear, Beat at this gate that let thy folly
in, And thy dear judgment out!
And let me not be mad!
Not mad!
So he’s trying to get hold of his head, and I wanted, as I think we all do to get
hold of, to grasp what’s going on inside.
So I took, knocked on the door of neuroscience instead, my instinct is that these shapes,
in front of our eyes, have an effect on the shapes behind our eyes.
How can I test this.
Thank you very much.
That’s right.
I’m gonna strap you up, make sure you don’t run away.
Phil turned to Dr. Geelong Teary at neuroscience department at the University
of Bangle.
Geel used an electroencephalo-graph or EEG machine to monitor what happens inside Phil’s
head when he reads a series of sentences, including one using Shakespeare’s intriguing
use of ‘godded’ to mean ‘deified’.
EEG records brain waves and electrical signals emitted by the brain.
Geel knew that if the brain is confused by the meaning of a word, it reacts by sending
out a distinct electrical respond 400 milliseconds after reading the word, it’s called N400.
If on the other hand the brain was thrilled by the grammar, it generated a different responds
after 600 milliseconds, and that’s called P600.
These distinct signals are saying in effect: N400?
Ignore that, that’s nonsense.
P600?
That’s odd, but it must mean something.
Phill and Geel tested four different phrases, starting with the simple control sentence
that both made sense and used the correct grammar.
The next two sentences violated either grammar or sense.
The big question was: how would Phil’s brain respond to that odd word ‘godded’, what
electrical signal would it generate?
After analyzing data from twenty other subjects as well as Phil, Geel revealed his results.
So let take the first one.
‘They thought so well of the hero they deified him.’
In that case you get neither N400 nor P600.
So there is no sign of grammatical violation and semantic violation.
Essentially, this is the brain saying: nothing special here, I have nothing to react to.
It’s just you know… it’s just life…
It’s our base life, where we start from.
Communication.
It’s communication, and honestly it’s dead boring.
So I’m not interested in that.
No.
So which one do you like to take?
I would definitely leave the functional shift for the end.
Because that would be more exciting.
So let’s go for: ‘They thought so well of the hero, they printed him.’
It’s obviously semantically impropriate, and what you’re getting here is a N400 variation.
N400 because it doesn’t make sense to say: they thought so well of the hero that they
printed him.
So, N400 is basically the brain showing: eh, this doesn’t…
This doesn’t make sense.
Ya.
Exactly.
That’s the kind of response we would expect, that’s what we’ve got.
So this is very nice.
So, here, in this collaboration is sentence number three: ‘They thought so well of the
hero, that they candled him.’
What we get is both N400 and P600.
So we can tell the brain is both shocked in terms of the content, the meaning, and also
shocked by the form.
So the brain has quite different levels of shocks, because it’s a syntactic error,
as for it’s also shocked because there’s a meaning error.
Two quite separate processes.
Completely different processes.
So fourth, the last but by no means the least, Shakespeare, or Shakespeare diluted: ‘They
thought so well of the hero, that they godded him.’
What we get is fundamentally P600 effect.
There is no violation of meaning.
The meaning is perfected integrated normally.
But the grammatical structure, the grammatical destruction is produced.
So there is a big P600, a big kick on that word, but nonetheless, unlike with ‘candled’,
there is no N400, the brain says: I cannot accept this.
So essentially what Shakespeare’s doing, is ever so often, just wanting things the
reader might be getting a bit too relaxed, knowing that would be coming the next.
He’ll throw in a kind of adore word to get the attention going.
You couldn’t find the word that’s more appropriate actually, he’s basically throwing
in something that is going to be surprising, generates, you know, activities and responses
on the brain that act really, generally like onboard detectors.
So Phil, did you get what you expecting out of that?
I think so.
I think that what’s clearly established is what the scientists call: functional shift.
A robust phenomenon.
Has to say it works every time, and Shakespeare uses it often enough for us to be able to
infer he knows that that is an importance instrument.
I would say, it’s like an evolutionary tool.
That’s to say it raises levels of attention.
It primes the mind for difficulty.
And chances are, maybe, that it leads on to the mind being ready to take different pathways
from the obvious one.
Phil and Geel’s unique experiment shows that Shakespeare’s literary trick literally
electrifies the brain.
The express of use of a noun as a verb acts like a neuron kick, slapping the brain to
attention.
Shakespeare also uses a more common trick to rivet attention: He spins a good yarn.
French writer Marcel Proust called the stories the divine pleasure.
It was one so intense that it made him reluctant to lift his eyes from the page.
Recent brain studies suggest that made-out stories, far from being mere escapism, may
provide the most energetic of all cerebral work-outs.
For many generations of readers, Wuthering Heights, the tragic tale of Katherine and
Heathcliff, has provided that special pleasure.
Its author, Emily Bronte, owned everything to her childhood and an insatiable passion
for books.
Over 150 years ago, Emily’s father, Patrick, an Irish clergyman, came here to the remote
village of Howard with his family.
He single-handed brought up his children, a son: Bramwell, and three daughters: Charlotte,
Ann, and Emily.
They had all inherited their father’s zeal for the written word, and in turn, created
some of the masterpieces of the English literature.
I met Juliet Barker, a leading biographer of the Bronte Family, to find out how reading
molded the minds of Patrick’s children.
It was crucially important to him, I mean, you have to remember he came from a family
that was basically illiterate in Irland, a small tenant-famer family.
As one of many children he taught himself to read and write, and he knew the value of
education at 16.
He set up his own school to teach village children.
Patrick’s own children read everything they could lay their hands on.
We now know of course they were building up those reading networks in their brains.
So they began to create their own stories.
I was sitting in the parlor, and this is the power house of the Bronte family because this
is where the girls and Bramwell too, as a young boy, spent a lot of their time, because
this is where they would gather every day to write and to talk.
They would walk around the table on and on, tramping around and around, discussing plots,
discussing characters, discussing the stories they were going to write.
Here in the parlor, the neuron circuit inside the Bronte sister’s brains conjured up new
worlds and characters.
They called their imaginary realms Angria and Gondal.
Even in adulthood, Gondal meant everything for Emily Bronte, and directly inspired her
one completed novel Wuthering Heights.
With Emily, she might be doing the housework, she might be baking the bread, but she could
be thinking about her imaginary characters all the time.
So Gondal was crucial to her, and she couldn’t break away from that.
So Wuthering Height is literally a continuation of Gondal, particularly the figure of Heathcliff,
this misanthropic violent character.
In the burst of creativity, the story of Heathcliff and Catherine poured from Emily’s brain
onto the page.
The words of Emily Bronte still possess the power to change minds, and even lives.
Tom Palmer grew up in the next valley to Howard.
Just a few years ago, he would never have contemplated picking up a book.
I just didn’t want to read books.
I had all the other things to do.
But why?
What did you think books were about?
What was wrong with them?
There was nothing in them for me.
There was nothing of interest.
Why would I want to read a story?
What would I want to do… to look for in a book?
Really, there’s television, computer, at the weekends, playing football.
Desperate, Tom’s mother gave him books about his consuming passion: football, to kick start
his reading habit, and the plan worked.
Tom moved from the soccer fan books to the classics.
I found books including fictions that I just never read, and one particular book was Wuthering
Height, to me, it was a revelation I was reading about, the times and places where I lived
and went.
I was reading a story about a lot of lives about quite messed-up people.
I remember the reading, that was the first classic novel I’ve read, and I absolutely
loved that, and still do in the end.
That made me think I could read novels because it was relevant to me, it was about people.
a bit like me, or like people I knew.
And reading Wuthering Height was actually a gateway to loads more reading.
For Tom, reading changed everything, he started writing himself and today he is a prize-winning
author of teenage fiction.
Emily Bronte also believes words could change lives.
One of the most passionately expressed ideas in Wuthering Heights, is that: literacy liberates.
Education and reading is absolutely essential to Wuthering Heights, the whole point is that
Heathcliff has been brought up without being taught to read or write, he was treated as
a savage so he came a non-civilized savage.
So his way of getting his revenge on them, on this family as to have treated him like
that, is to take Cathy and Shaun’s young hair, and deprive him of an education, his
saving grace is that he meets the young Cathy, the second Cathy, who teaches him how to read.
And she is literally releasing him from the bondage that Heathcliff has created, and she
is setting him free, and you know, they are then going to get together, and then they
are going to go onto the future and break this terrible hold that Heathcliff had on
them.
And Heathcliff, Emily’s imagined character, took hold of Tom’s mind in an all together
different way.
Was there anyone in Wuthering Heights that you particularly identified with?
I did.
I identify with Heathcliff definitely.
You don’t look much of a Heathcliff sort of person.
I just…
I was…
I mean I was about twentieth.
There’s a lot of the brooding violence and aggression, and I had a lot of that in me.
I look of him as a character, and I still do and talk about him, for most of the time,
read him again, just because he’s so like…
He reminded of a few people I knew from the football.
Tom discovered the single most powerful effect of reading, the way a book opened a door into
other worlds and another minds.
There is a phrase in libraries creative reading, and I think that reading is a creative act
in itself as writing is, because you are creating something while you are reading, you are bringing
in your own experiences, it’s hard to put it into words, but, something to do with:
when you can get into mind what the characters are seeing, what they are experiencing, you
may show better empathizing, I think that sounds a bit fanciful, but I think it did
make me less of a selfish person.
I’m not usually talking about books this way I do, but I believe that the fictions
are how you may see things from other people point of view.
The Bronte sisters no doubt sensed that reading could fire up empathy in some compelling but
mysterious way.
But can science explain this power?
Emily’s sister Charlotte seemed to think it could.
She was one of the millions who tried out that nineteenth century craze philology.
Philologists measure by different bumps on the head, claiming they reveal what kind of
mind laid beneath.
They thought that the size of the bumps provided the evidence of various human capacities,
such as the ability to form friendships or to feel sympathy, in other words, how good
are our brains work empathizing.
Philology was nonsense of course but it wasn’t so dumb for Charlotte Bronte to be interested
in because it’s actually a brain science at its time.
And actually the idea wasn’t so dumb either.