The DHLC likes brains and they’re especially interested in how it works while reading. Make sure to check out part one about the lab that’s trying to decode your brain on Jane Austen.
Jane Austen reads your mind
Why not “Harry Potter” or Shakespeare? Sure, they need a consistent variable, but why the 196-year-old British novelist? The theory is that Jane Austen works on multiple levels.
“[She] is perfect for this type of work because everybody can pleasure read Jane Austen,” Pearson said. “At the same time, there are centuries of scholarship where literary critics have analyzed this text very closely.”
How it All Operates
What Pearson finds interesting about the whole project is that so many different groups of people work together on it. It is very interdisciplinary.
“We have these neuroscientific people who are looking at actual brain regions and saying, ‘what does this brain region do? If this is active, then what does that mean for the experience the person is having in the scanner,’” Pearson said. “Then we have English students or literary graduate students who are able to actually analyze the text itself that’s being presented. They want to know how they can correlate all of this brain activity.”
Pearson said they’ve noticed some trends.
For example, the way in which Austen uses descriptions of space and how the brain processes that.
“What we’re hoping to do is look at these specific moments during the scan when people were reading those passages or quotes,” Pearson said. “Are we maybe seeing places in the brain that process spatial relationships or distances? There are a lot of different directions you can take and that’s just one of them.”
DHLC in the Future
The project has been going for a couple of years now, but they are just getting in to the heavy data analysis.
“It’s a pretty exciting study because it’s one of the first to use fMRI to look at reading holistically,” Pearson said. “Normally it’s a challenge.”
He explained how in similar studies in the past, neuroscientists have looked at one word, taken a brain scan of that exact moment and said, “this is what reading looks like.”
“But reading, to us, has to be sustained—you have to continue reading to really get into the story,” Pearson said. “If you’re reading one word at time and stopping, you’re not going to get the flow, you’re not going to get the effect.”
It’s an interesting way to view the brain and with the amount of data coming in, Pearson believes that the lab is here to stay.
“It was a really well-designed study because it gave us so much to work with,” Pearson said. “I can see stuff spinning off of this years into the future.”
How do you read? Should we fret about the difference between reading? Feel free to leave a comment saying why.