Shakespeare Makes You Smarter: Proof

Philip Davis studies Shakespeare’s language and its effects on the Brain:

[We found that] while the Shakespearian functional shift was semantically integrated with ease, it triggered a syntactic re-evaluation process likely to raise attention and extra emergent consciousness, and giving more power and sheer life to the sentence as a whole.

In this way Shakespeare is stretching us, making us more alive, at a level of neural excitement…Our findings begin to show how Shakespeare created dramatic effects by implicitly taking advantage of the relative independence – at the neural level – of semantics and syntax in sentence comprehension. It is as though he is a pianist using one hand to keep the background melody going, whilst simultaneously the other pushes towards ever more complex variations and syncopations.

One Comment

  1. JRE
    Posted July 15, 2008 at 9:25 pm | Permalink

    It’s a vicious cycle.

    Shakespeare leads to intelligence which leads to depression which leads to Shakespeare.


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