This Week's Science

Your brain on Shakespeare

"Creative language keeps our brain alive". This is the opinion of Professor Philip Davis of the University of Liverpool. He feels that so much language nowadays is totally predictable, and  "you can often tell what someone is going to say before they finish their sentence. This represents a gradual deadening of the brain." (And I'm sure he has never even heard of Belén Esteban!) This is one of the reasons why he suggests Shakespeare has been so successful. This Elizabethan poet and playwright used a range of 17,677 words in his works, and he invented 1,700 of them. His "lightning-fast capacity for forging metaphor created a theater of the brain," says Davis, and this it what caused a huge impact on readers and audiences. Read the full article here.

Source: Larry Ferlazzo's website