The Telegraph recently included a piece about research done at the University of Liverpool on brain function whilst reading literature. The literature professor working on this research, Philip Davis, has swum into my ken before:

I had heard about this research before, watching the BBC’s Reading Matters series. (Recap the relevant scenes here). At the time it had seemed to me to attach to some of the material I was most interested in in the area of literature and society, the sort of material explored by Martha Nussbaum in Poetic Justice, or by Wayne C. Booth in The Company We Keep: an Ethics of Fiction. All of these sources attached somewhat contentious tags to the effect that reading fiction was a good “training ground” for empathy. That by ‘being around’ and caring about fictitious others, we could develop the habit of attaining others’ points of view and get better at making judgments with a high degree of empathetic understanding. For my part, I found this area fascinating, because I was interested in the idea of books offering the prospect of the ‘projected self’, and of ideas of empathy and identity derived from my readings of Paul Ricoeur. (My own research was about how working with and in books affected primarily visual artists’ creativity and ideas of themselves).

The Liverpool work wasn’t strictly speaking to do with empathy, but about the power of reading to make us make new connections; however, the two subjects are related (and both were featured in the BBC programme I referenced). The comments in the newspaper article do bring up the problematic relationship of assigning behavioural-scale meaning to brain function; that correlation is not explanation in and of itself. Nevertheless, the outcomes are, if not surprising, a step towards understanding some of these impulses, values, feelings from a more scientific viewpoint. The point is, I think, not to understand that Shakespeare makes us think, but to allow those feelings, those experiences, new language that can bring it closer to the naturalistic fold when and if that seems apposite.

My interest was piqued by the language used by Philip Davis in describing how ‘The Shakepeared Brain‘ jumps ‘electically’ to new connections, new meanings and insights when confronted by Shakespeare’s challenging language and shifts in word-usage. Davis’ language reminded me of my own interst in metaphor as (confusingly) a metaphor for how we can happen upon insight and new constructions – a concept that figures broadly in my 2010 PhD thesis. That is to say – the linguistic trope of metaphor does not describe what physiologically or mentally happens when I experience metaphor, but it coins a striking likeness in another field of being. Metaphor is a trope, not a neurological description: but it is something that happens to our minds. In reading, it sometimes works a bit like this: jumping from word to word, we notice a new meaning when some unusual word is jammed, hugger-mugger, into a new context. This isn’t a metaphor. This doesn’t follow the form of metaphor, but it works in a similar way; ‘madded’ is mad – but not quite, or not only. The metaphorization disrupts our expectations and lets new meaning new connection, into the reading.

Another comment in the Telegraph was that the research showed nothing surprising. Well, perhaps not; but being able to build a naturalistic and quantifiable picture of the benefits of reading has value not only for therapeutic application, but in defending reading and its paraphernalia as not ‘merely’ of cultural value, but of positive impact in other measurable ways.

It turns out that Davis is (or at least was in 2010) the editor of the Reader magazine, to which I’ve linked a couple of times here. I’ll definitely be looking at their output in future.