How does Your Brain Read?
Brains have proven to be a magnificent and complicated tool. Scientists have begun to delve deeper and deeper into the complex mechanics of our most powerful organ, figuring out throughout the years what specific parts of the brain are capable of doing.
With this in mind, a very interesting question was asked: what does reading look like in the brain? It turns out that it is much more complicated than we think or so says the Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition lab (DHLC) on MSU’s campus.
I talked to Craig Pearson, a dual-major in English and Neuroscience. He also works as the undergraduate lab manager at the DHLC. The lab was designed by Dr. Natalie Phillips who hails from Stanford, but now works at MSU.
Reading Differently
Their main goal, Pearson explained, is to look at the different ways someone can read a work of literature. To avoid an abstract description, they use fMRIs (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging).
“It’s this technique of brain scanning where you can put someone in one of these big, magnetic scanners and measure the blood flow in the brain,” Pearson said.“Looking at which brain region the blood is supplying, we can figure out which parts of the brain are active over time.”
Once in the scanners, they have the subjects (all PhD students from Stanford) read passages of “Mansfield Park” by Jane Austen.
How does your brain read?
The testees had to inspect the first two chapters in a certain way:
“There’s the type of reading you can do, for example, on the beach or on an airplane or in a book store; we’re calling it pleasure reading,” Pearson said. “There’s also the technique that you would learn in an English class called close reading.”
Close reading is a sharp analysis which searches for literary devices and different things like that.
But, shouldn’t all reading look the same in the brain?
Apparently not.
Just by telling people to read more intently versus your standard reading shows a difference.
“There’s a clear change in the way the brain is interacting with the text,” Pearson said.
Pearson and the researchers have undoubtedly found this all very interesting.
While the results are still new, we beg to ask: what is the value of studying humanities?
“’What’s the value in an English major,’ I’ve been asked occasionally,” Pearson said. “This is one of those things. It’s the ability to shift modes of attention.”