Your
Brain on Jane Austen
An
Exemplar of an Interdisciplinary Research Study
To Attend to or Distract from
Following Text Taken from an NPR broadcast on Oct. 9, 2012:
“Could
modern cognitive theories explain character development in one of
Jane Austen's most famous heroines — Pride
and Prejudice's
Elizabeth Bennett? Dr. Natalie Phillips of Michigan State University
thinks Bennett's distractability
was key to Austen's characterization of her lively mind — and that
Austen herself was drawing on the contemporary theories of cognition
in her time.
If
neuroscience could inform literature, Phillips asked, could
literature inform neuroscience?
She
decided to conduct
a research study,
looking at how reading affects the brain. She had volunteers lie
still in a brain scanner and read Austen. Phillips sometimes
instructed her volunteers to browse, as they might do at a bookstore.
Other times, she asked them to delve deep, as a scholar might read a
text while conducting a literary analysis.
Phillips
said the experiment produced some surreal moments: "If you asked
me on a top 10 list of things that I did not expect to find myself
doing as an 18th-centuryist when I first started this study on the
history of distraction, I would say laying on my back in an MRI
scanner trying to figure out how to position paragraphs by Jane
Austen so that you wouldn't have to turn your head while reading with
a mirror."
Phillips
and her collaborators scanned the brains of the volunteers using a
functional magnetic resonance imaging machine. The scanner paints a
rough picture of brain activity. A computer program simultaneously
tracked readers' eye movements across the page, and researchers kept
tabs on the volunteers' breathing and heart rate. At the end of the
experiment, Phillips asked each volunteer to write a short essay
based on the passages he or she read.
Neuroscientists
warned Phillips she wouldn't see many brain differences between the
casual reading and intense reading.
"Everyone
told me to expect these really, really minute and subtle effects,"
she said, "because everyone was going to be doing the same
thing, right? Reading Jane Austen. And they were just going to be
doing it in two different ways."
Phillips
said she mainly expected to see differences in parts of the brain
that regulate attention because that was the main difference between
casual and focused reading.
But
in a neuroscientific plot twist, Phillips said preliminary results
showed otherwise: "What's been taking us by surprise in our
early data analysis is how much the whole brain — global
activations across a number of different regions — seems to be
transforming and shifting between the pleasure and the close
reading."
Phillips
found that close reading activated unexpected areas: parts of the
brain that are involved in movement and touch. It was as though
readers were physically placing themselves within the story as they
analyzed it.
Phillips'
research fits into an interdisciplinary new field sometimes dubbed
"literary neuroscience." Other researchers are examining
poetry and rhythm in the brain, how metaphors excite sensory regions
of the brain, and the neurological shifts between reading a complex
text like Marcel Proust compared with reading a newspaper — all in
hopes of giving a more complete picture of human cognition.”
Professor Natalie Phillips, MSU
Here
are links to two other articles on Dr. Phillips' study:
Incorporating
Materials into my Undergraduate Course:
I
intend to use Dr. Phillips' research set-up and another on cats
described in a recent Atlantic article entitled “How
Your Cat Is Making You Crazy” –
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/03/how-your-cat-is-making-you-crazy/8873
– as case studies of the construction and use of the
scientific method in my re-development of Brandman's liberal arts
core foundations course, LBSU 300.
John Freed, Ph.D
freed@brandman.edu
Associate Professor of Humanities/Liberal Studies
Brandman Universitya member of the Chapman University System
