Last updated by kprzemek on 2017-05-18. Originally submitted by tomski on 2017-05-15.
WA Distinguished Professors' Lectures Series features internationally renowned scholars visiting the Faculty of English to share their research and professional expertise with WA faculty and students.
Neuropoetry: How Shakespeare tempest the brain and how poetry catches the mind
by
Prof. Guillaume Thierry
Thursday, May 18, 2017, 18.30, C1
Everyone more than welcome to attend!
As cognitive neuroscientists have developed an interest in the study of human emotion, the neurophysiological mechanisms underpinning aesthetic experience have gradually come under the spotlight. Studies aiming to understand the main cognitive processes at work when someone perceives the beauty of a body movement, of a painting, a music score, or a literary construct are starting to become main stream. One powerful domain of aesthetic experience is that of poetry, arguably the ultimate verbal art form. In this presentation, I will review results from our lab spanning 10 years (only three studies, fear not!) looking at a literary device used by Shakespeare –the functional shift– that entailed changing the grammatical status of words and an ancient form of Welsh poetry –Cynghanedd– which obeys strict composition rules. First, I will present evidence that, compared to its standard syntactic equivalent, the Shakespearean functional shift elicits a state of surprise in the reader (and presumably the listener) without having a detrimental effect on semantic content integration (Thierry et al. 2008). I will then show how the functional shift elicits brain activations outside the classical network of regions supporting literal language comprehension, such as the inferior frontal and inferior temporal gyri in the right hemisphere, suggesting a physiological explanation for an emotional / metaphorical impact of the functional shift (Keidel et al., 2012). Finally, I will discuss recent findings suggesting that the brain of native speakers of Welsh who are unfamiliar with Cynghanedd –and who thus fail to identify violations of its construction rules– successfully detects poetic harmony in the absence of apparent awareness (Vaughan-Evans et al., 2016). Together, these results suggest that automatic and implicit processes underpinning language processing in humans extend to the finest forms of language constructs, giving credence to the point made by T.S. Elliott in 1988: “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”
Using experimental psychology and electroencephalography, Prof. Guillaume Thierry studies language comprehension in the auditory and visual modalities, and mainly the processing of meaning by the human brain, i.e., semantic access. Since he started his career at Bangor University in 2000, Professor Thierry has investigated a range of themes, such as verbal/non-verbal dissociations, visual object recognition, colour perception, functional cerebral asymmetry, language-emotion interactions, language development, developmental dyslexia, and bilingualism. Since 2005, Prof. Thierry has received funding form the BBSRC, the ESRC, the AHRC, the European Research Council, and the British Academy to investigate the integration of meaning in infants and adults at lexical, syntactic, and conceptual levels, using behavioural measurements, event-related brain potentials eye-tracking and functional neuroimaging, looking at differences between sensory modalities, different languages in bilinguals, and coding system (verbal / nonverbal). Prof. Thierry’s core research question is how the human brain crystallises knowledge and builds up a meaningful representation of the world around it. He now focuses on linguistic relativity and the philosophical question of mental freedom.
