The April 19th issue of New Scientist magazine had three articles about Shakespeare, in honour of his 450th birthday. They appear in ascending order of interest to this blog, and are all about how his work relates to science. (Many of the other articles in the magazine are interesting too, by the way: I am pleased to know about the ‘primordial soup paradox’, and what the ‘M’ in ‘M-theory’ stands for.)

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The first, by Dan Falk, mainly focuses on the ways in which Hamlet may be tuned into the latest developments in astronomy.

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The second, by Rowan Hooper, reads Shakespeare’s characters as case histories of some very modern ailments, with varying results. It seems frivolous to suggest that Macbeth has ingested some dodgy prions from the witches’ cauldron and his brain is breaking down as a result. Pondering the specifics of dementia in King Lear seems more promising. Seeing Hamlet as bipolar, and Coriolanus as autistic, risks anachronism, as Hooper acknowledges: ‘we bring our own cultural and scientific baggage to the Bard’. On the one hand, it is problematic to value Shakespeare for the extent to which he can be seen to anticipate today’s science. On the other, if you believe that today’s science provides better answers than those of the past (if not final and perfect ones), or if you believe that it matters whether, and how, literature of the past can resonate with modern concerns, then reading characters as case histories of this sort is far from inane.

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The third article, by David Robson, explores Shakespeare’s ‘intuitive understanding of how our brains work’. He describes research by Philip Davis and Guillaume Thierry, which looks at how Shakespeare’s language affects the brain. Using fMRI and EEG scans, they found that ‘’ caused activity in the parts of the brain associated with emotion and autobiographical memory (amongst other things). Shakespeare innovates with words, it seems, in such a way that grammar and feeling interconnect.
      A new twist for me arose in a comment by Thierry that the Shakespearean phrases cause activity in the basal ganglia, ‘an area sparked when bilinguals switch between languages’. This struck a chord with me, as I recently re-read something wrote in . Prynne recounts how his schoolboy exercises in translation opened up a space between languages, which he relished, and which underlay his later adventures in poetic language. This seems congruent with, if not identical to, what Thierry (and Davis) are working on.
      Robson’s article also turns to Robin Dunbar, an Evolutionary Psychologist from Oxford. Dunbar is collaborating with Laurie Maguire (Shakespeare) and Felix Budelmann (Greek Tragedy) on a project linking drama with social psychology. Some findings – see here – were published in the Times Literary Supplement last year. In the New Scientist piece he focuses on Shakespeare’s acuteness as an observer of the human capacity to interact with other minds. For example, gossip scenes tend to involve only a few speakers discussing someone; this conforms to social psychologists’ ideas about how, in small groups, we can keep track of others well enough for conversation to turn pointedly towards, or against, an absent person. In larger groups we tend to be more wary, and thus discreet. ‘Theory of mind’ is a distinctive human capacity but it has its limits; , who has written so well about theory of mind and the novel, has also taken into account this limit (we can only track what X says Y thinks Z wants… to so many levels).
      Robson ends up wondering whether projects like these make up ‘a brave new world of Shakespeare studies’. The overstatement conveyed by the overused quotation makes this sound a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I’ll take it at face value, and say… maybe so.

Continuing an earlier post about self-recognition, here are the ‘glasses’ (i.e. mirrors) of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. As I set out in that earlier post, a link has been made by psychologists between self-recognition and knowing others. It seemed to me then that Shakespeare sometimes tangles these things together very richly, as I think he does in the poems below.

Shakespeare, Sonnet 3

Look in thy , and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another;
Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
For where is she so fair whose unear’d womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
Or who is he so fond will be the tomb
Of his self-love, to stop posterity?
Thou art thy mother’s , and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime:
So thou through windows of thine age shall see
Despite of wrinkles this thy golden time.
      But if thou live, remember’d not to be,
      Die single, and thine image dies with thee.

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Sonnet 22

My shall not persuade me I am old,
So long as youth and thou are of one date;
But when in thee time’s furrows I behold,
Then look I death my days should expiate.
For all that beauty that doth cover thee
Is but the seemly raiment of my heart,
Which in thy breast doth live, as thine in me:
How can I then be elder than thou art?
O, therefore, love, be of thyself so wary
As I, not for myself, but for thee will;
Bearing thy heart, which I will keep so chary
As tender nurse her babe from faring ill.
      Presume not on thy heart when mine is slain;
      Thou gavest me thine, not to give back again.

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Sonnet 62

Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye
And all my soul and all my every part;
And for this sin there is no remedy,
It is so grounded inward in my heart.
Methinks no face so gracious is as mine,
No shape so true, no truth of such account;
And for myself mine own worth do define,
As I all other in all worths surmount.
But when my shows me myself indeed,
Beated and chopp’d with tann’d antiquity,
Mine own self-love quite contrary I read;
Self so self-loving were iniquity.
      ‘Tis thee, myself, that for myself I praise,
      Painting my age with beauty of thy days.

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Sonnet 77

Thy will show thee how thy beauties wear,
Thy dial how thy precious minutes waste;
The vacant leaves thy mind’s imprint will bear,
And of this book this learning mayst thou taste.
The wrinkles which thy will truly show
Of mouthed graves will give thee memory;
Thou by thy dial’s shady stealth mayst know
Time’s thievish progress to eternity.
Look, what thy memory can not contain
Commit to these waste blanks, and thou shalt find
Those children nursed, deliver’d from thy brain,
To take a new acquaintance of thy mind.
      These offices, so oft as thou wilt look,
      Shall profit thee and much enrich thy book.

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Sonnet 103

Alack, what poverty my Muse brings forth,
That having such a scope to show her pride,
The argument all bare is of more worth
Than when it hath my added praise beside!
O, blame me not, if I no more can write!
Look in your , and there appears a face
That over-goes my blunt invention quite,
Dulling my lines and doing me disgrace.
Were it not sinful then, striving to mend,
To mar the subject that before was well?
For to no other pass my verses tend
Than of your graces and your gifts to tell;
      And more, much more, than in my verse can sit
      Your own shows you when you look in it.

I said in the ‘About’ page that I’d post when I publish something relevant. Well, I am pleased to say that an essay by me has come out in a special issue of Paragraph called Reading Literature Cognitively, edited by Terence Cave. My essay is ‘Shakespeare, Perception and Theory of Mind’, Paragraph, 37 (2014), 79-95. Here is the abstract:

This essay explores the second ghost scene in Hamlet as an experiment in social cognition. It turns to scientific experiments on the relationship between vision and theory of mind, and to Shakespearean moments where audiences’ experience of the visual world of a play is shaped by what characters say they are seeing. The ‘Dover Cliff’ scene in King Lear is considered as an example of an audience’s constructive demeanour, rather than of the deception at the heart of theatre. The essay also recognizes the importance of the complexity of ghost belief in the period as a context for the scene’s apparent attempts to switch between the perspectives of Hamlet (who can see the ghost) and Gertrude (who cannot).

I’m not sure I’ve sold it very well there. I hope to come back to this theme (what literature, especially drama, knows about how we perceive things together) in the future, as I think I was getting somewhere…

I’ve also written a post for the Literature Technology Media blog run by some colleagues. They have been featuring a different ‘technological object’ each month, and I recommend every single one of the previous posts. This month I have written something about the MRI Machine. I focus on a few appearances of MRI in literature and film, and I touch briefly on prisons and music. What I didn’t write about much was my outing to the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, where I visited a Siemens 3T Trio machine. Rik Henson kindly showed me round. An undergraduate friend and now an estimable neuroimager (neuroimagist?), he has already played a cameo role in a side-note in an earlier post here.
      One of the technical nuances I picked up didn’t make it into the piece for the other blog. It was that fMRI is good at saying where things are happening in your brain (within a few millimetres), but not so good at telling you when (and a few seconds is a long time in neural activation). In order to triangulate spatial precision with temporal precision, findings are tested using MEG (Magnetoencephalography), which is very good at time but not so good at space. The machines are very different: in an MRI it looks like you are being swallowed or entombed by the magnet, whereas in an MEG you appear to be wearing, and yet also sitting in, a very odd, very outsized, hat.

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Where MRI works with an enormous magnetic field, to which different substances in the body respond in different ways, MEG is sensitive to the absolutely tiny magnetic fields that result from electrical activity in the brain. The machine is housed in a metal chamber; everything possible is done to remove magnetic influences. I found this wonderful and strange: two machines with complementary attributes, aimed at the same mission, exploiting the same natural force, and yet they are fundamentally incompatible with one another. I suppose it could be difficult to recreate the same thought or feeling in both locations, if you want to establish the when and the where of a particular neural event. My impression is, though, as it is across the spectrum of cognitive science, that designing experiments to deal with such obstacles is where a lot of the excitement of the subject lies.

A couple of quick notes before the blog takes a two week break.

Note The First
* Philip Gerrans, ‘Pathologies of Hyperfamiliarity in Dreams, Delusions and Deja Vu’, Frontiers in Psychology, 5 (2014), 1-10.

I have just come back from an interesting couple of days in Birmingham at a workshop entitled ‘Dreams and Delusions in Early Modern Literature’. Organised by Ita Mac Carthy, it was the final event in Terence Cave’s Balzan Prize project ‘Literature as an Object of Knowledge‘. Philip Gerrans (Professor of Philosophy, University of Adelaide) was there, and he spoke about the Default Mode Network (DMN) in the brain. I’ve mentioned it recently here. It earned its name because activity in these regions continues when the brain is in a resting state, when it is not (for example) actively engaging in perception. You can read more about it in the essay mentioned above, online here. Philip argued that dreams and delusions (like fictions and daydreams and future plans) all involve the narrative-making capacities of the DMN. It constantly forms stories which link us with our experiences, plans, fears, desires, and so on. The difference is made by the extent to which its activity is tied into engagement with context (with dreams, for example, the most disengaged), and the extent to which ‘reality testing’ is applied to its products (dreams again were at the extreme end, where reality testing may be completely absent). There are overlaps, grey areas, subtleties, and understanding the DMN definitely seems like something that ought to offer more to literature (and vice versa I hope).

Note The Second
* Patrick Colm Hogan, What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion (Cambridge University Press, 2001)

After Easter I am joining many other Shakespeareos in Paris for a 450th birthday conference. Ah, the drudgery. I am participating in a seminar about Shakespeare and cognitive science. Patrick Colm Hogan, author of the book above, will be there, and I have been re-reading his work. At the time it came out I thought (wrongly, in retrospect) ‘well I’m not really working on emotion’ and, although I admired it, I didn’t do a lot with it. Possibly its title was with me when I started ‘What Literature Knows About Your Brain’, but I wasn’t conscious of that. This time around, with the priorities of this blog in mind, I am valuing, amongst other things, the way it suggests we can treat literature as ‘data’ for research into emotions as they arise in rich contexts. We could observe individuals reading, which would resemble some types of scientific experiment. Hogan argues that this would be a very narrow sample when we have good reason to believe that thousands and even millions of readers have recognised, or felt, emotions in literary works. He argues that analysis of the texts that produce these well-attested effects is a valid way of exploring romantic love, grief, mirth, guilt, shame, jealousy, attachment, ethics, compassion, pity, and more. Music to my ears.

Keith Oatley and P.N. Johnson-Laird, ‘Cognitive Approaches to Emotions’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18 (2014), 134-40.

This is the second piece in the March Trends in Cognitive Sciences that turns to literature (I wrote about the other one here). As part of this survey, Oatley and Johnson-Laird touch briefly on literary emotions (p. 136). They advance a theory of how we engage with literature, and what it does with us, that can be followed up in numerous other works by Keith Oatley. A bibliography follows at the end of this post: The Passionate Muse is a particularly interesting formal experiment, as it combines science with Oatley’s own fiction.
      When we read fiction, the theory goes, we identify with characters, and simulate their experiences, emotions, and intentions (to the extent that they are in effect ours). Oatley and Johnson-Laird cite research suggesting that exposure to fiction makes us better at reading thoughts and emotions in real people. For example, in experiments using the ‘mind in the eyes’ test (pioneered by Simon Baron-Cohen in his autism research), readers of literary fiction more accurately infer emotions from images of eyes.

On the whole this research seems like good news for literary studies. It offers a concrete rationale for the enduring status of novels and plays and poems in our cultural lives, and thus helps validate the time we spend on them. It gives us lots of work to do: categories such as ‘literary’ and ‘fiction’ are given convenient working definitions by psychologists but not (for the most part) interrogated deeply. Distinction between different kinds of text, different kinds of empathy within texts, don’t get off the ground, and yet if it’s true that literature makes us better at empathy through our engagement with characters, then exploring the myriad ways in which it does so seems worthwhile. I must get different things from Raskolnikov and Elizabeth Bennet.
      I have plans to explore empathy in drama in certain specific ways, and I am aware of other projects that are also refining other questions, approaches, and conclusions, from a literary perspective. The direct causality that seems to be involved is a bit unnerving. Am I really surrounded, in my working life in a literature department, with people who have this empathetic advantage? This is definitely something to come back to.

* Keith Oatley, ‘The Cognitive Science of Fiction’, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Cognitive Science, 3 (2012), 425-30.
* Keith Oatley, The Passionate Muse: Exploration of Emotion in Stories (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
* Keith Oatley, Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).
* Raymond A. Mar, Keith Oatley, and Jordan B. Peterson, ‘Exploring the Link Between Reading Fiction and Empathy: Ruling out Individual Differences and Examining Outcomes’, Communications, 34 (2009), 407-28.
* D.C. Kidd and E. Castano, ‘Reading Fiction Improves Theory of Mind’, Science, 342 (2013), 377-380.
* Maja Djikic, Keith Oatley, Mihnea C. Moldoveanu, ‘Reading Other Minds: Effects of Literature on Empathy’, Scientific Study of Literature, 3 (2013), 28-47.