K. Hoenig, C. Müller, B. Herrnberger, E.J. Sim, M. Spitzer, G. Ehret, M. Kiefer, ‘Neuroplasticity of Semantic Representations for Musical Instruments in Professional Musicians’, Neuroimage, 56 (2011), 1714-25.

This is a second post inspired by Nadja Tschentscher’s talk at the Goethezeit do; the first is here. Nadja was talking about ’embodied semantics’ (the ways in which abstract concepts and the brain’s sensorimotor system may be linked). One of her ideas was that although the absolutes of the topic might be hard to prove, we might get interested in how some people’s conceptual lives are more embodied than others’. (And perhaps vice versa; perhaps some people’s embodied experience is more conceptualised than others’; I don’t know, and I’m not even sure what that means.)
      In support of this, she discussed the engaging study cited above. The experiment tested what happened in the brains of professional musicians when they were shown pictures of musical instruments, in comparison with the brains of non-musicians. The musicians showed a lot more activation in the auditory centres of their brains, as if the abstract concept of a cello or a bassoon was, for them, hard-wired to the sounds they knew it could make.
      In scientific lingo, ‘intensive sensorimotor experience with musical instruments has been shown to entail plastic brain alterations in cortical perceptual and motor maps’, and in their experiment, ‘the unique intensive experience of musicians with musical instruments establishes a link between auditory perceptual and conceptual brain systems’. These ‘higher-level semantic representations for musical instruments in and adjacent to auditory association cortex… highlight the eminent importance of sensory and motor experience for acquiring rich concepts’.

*

* Tom Sperlinger, Romeo and Juliet in Palestine: Teaching Under Occupation (Zero Books, 2015)

What links this excellent memoir of teaching literature at Al-Quds University in the Occupied West Bank, with the sparks of auditory activation in the minds of trained musicians? Well, not a great deal, but you may see in the end why it came to my mind. I was struck by lots of things in the book – the portraits of colleagues and students, the juxtaposition of familiar classroom challenges with a totally unfamiliar infrastructure, and more – but perhaps most of all I was struck by something Sperlinger said about Romeo and Juliet.
      Sperlinger says that his Palestinian students were engaged not so much by the play’s representation of love, but by the dangers faced by the young couple. I suppose, in the light of the Hoenig et al. essay, we could see this as a result of mental plasticity and sensory experience, as well as of a different set of interests and preoccupations. I have had very little experience of agitated crowds veering between fight and flight, or rapidly changing and escalating threats of violence, and so these things cannot resonate with my sensorimotor experience. I don’t have a ‘rich concept’ of such things, so perhaps my attention is less likely to settle there.
      I find this quite suggestive as a way of thinking about how experience shapes literary response. It’s not really the same thing that the scientists were looking at, which was the influence of expertise; and literary interpretation results from lots of different interlocking factors. Still, I like the thought that experience shapes our ‘rich concepts’; that different groups of people might develop identifiable ‘rich concepts’ that separate them from others; that we could think, therefore, what (for example) the typical Shakespearean audience had seen or heard or felt that tuned them in to aspects of the play that just aren’t striking us right.