The Bard on the Brain: Understanding the Mind Through the Art of Shakespeare and the Science of Brain Imaging

  • Paul M. Matthews &
  • Jeffery McQuain
Dana Press: 2003. 192 pp. £24.50 University of Chicago Press: 2003. 192 pp. $35
“Once more unto the breach”: Shakespeare's Henry V used mental imagery to rally his troops.

Every now and then, an editor will come up with what seems to them to be a brilliantly original wheeze. Here, Jane Nevins of the Dana Press persuaded Paul Matthews, a neurologist, and Jeffery McQuain, an English scholar, to use Shakespeare's plays as a vehicle for describing the brain correlates of cognitive function. Perhaps she was prompted by the popular success of the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love, in which the audience meets the young Shakespeare, then struggling with writer's block and trying to meet a deadline for his new play, Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter, whose plot is suggested to him by his rival, Christopher Marlowe. More significantly, the film conveys the powerful effect of a live theatre performance on an audience. How does theatre weave its magic spell? In the film, Phillip Henslowe, director of The Rose Theatre, gives his answer: “I don't know. It's a mystery.”

The connection between theatre and the brain explored in this book is less mysterious when we learn that the remit of the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives is to publicize information about the benefits of brain research. The most visible and successful of the initiatives is Brain Awareness Week, a popular event held annually in many centres worldwide. It provides an invaluable forum for members of the public to meet patient-support organizations and local brain scientists, who usually cover a wide breadth of basic and clinical research.

Square and 'coffee table' in its aspect, there is much that is artful in this book. It is itself a play in seven 'acts'. Each act covers different topics, such as “Minds and Brains”, “Our Inner World” and “The Seventh Age of Man”, and each contains a number of 'scenes', whose titles range from the straightforwardly banal, “The Wonder of the Human Brain”, to the dramatic, “Let Me Clutch Thee”, to the boggling, “Putting an English Tongue in a French Brain”. Each scene begins with a précis of a plot or subplot from one of the plays, which is followed by an excerpt from a scene and finally a commentary that interweaves topics evoked by the excerpt and its speculative neurological correlate. With 34 such scenes, this unrelenting format does wear a little thin. Writing anything worth reading alongside an excerpt from Shakespeare is a challenge, but here even the shortest sentences can somehow contrive to emphasize the difference, as in “Shakespeare has Juliet ponder what defines a 'Montague'”.

The subsequent analyses are largely unrevealing: “Shakespeare was a keen observer of human nature”, or “some of his characters talk to themselves in sonnets”. Unfortunately, much of the commentary on Shakespeare's text is reminiscent of the cribs one crammed the night before the English literature examination in the hope of impressing the teacher with such pearls as “Shakespeare lived intimately with a rich world of imagination, which he communicated to others through words and stage action”.

The book's illustrations are prodigal. The full-page photographs of performances of Shakespeare's plays appear without context or connection to the text. The neurological illustrations are small, 'arty' graphics of the computer-generated variety, a technique that has too easily enabled images of the brain, each postage-stamp-sized, to multiply on obscure and complicated backgrounds. Again, the repetition of style makes these brain images interchangeable. What's actually being illustrated is not only hard to see, but is poorly explained, despite lengthy captions, albeit of variable fidelity. The caption of figure 9, for example, implying that the right and left visual fields map onto the primary visual cortex of the same hemisphere, could be written off as a schoolboy howler, were it not that the accompanying text confirms that the authors really have misinterpreted the experiment illustrated, which shows the distribution of cortical visual areas and not, as they state, the well-known 'ocular dominance columns' of the primary visual cortex, which are beyond the spatial resolution of the scanners used.

The neurological material is restricted mainly to functional imaging of the human brain, principally the “folded surface of the brain (called the cortex) ... where neurons are found”. Unfortunately, the different imaging methods — for example, positron-emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) — used in the various studies referred to in the book are not properly explained. There is no doubt that fMRI has revolutionized cognitive neuroscience. The method, however, does not actually detect “the amount of fresh blood flow”, but records changes in the levels of the paramagnetic molecule deoxyhaemoglobin. How this blood-oxygen-level-dependent signal (the so-called BOLD signal) correlates with neural activity has been the subject of intense and technically difficult invasive experiments with animals, but such experiments are vital steps in developing a deeper understanding of the basic physiology and anatomy underlying human brain function.

This information would help lay readers to understand why the non-invasive techniques now used in human studies cannot, on their own, “define the brain mechanisms responsible for thoughts, emotions, and disorders that Shakespeare wonderfully described”. The reader is left with the impression that imaging techniques all produce multiple images of tiny brains decorated with rainbow-coloured blobs of unknown significance. This is a missed opportunity to explain why different techniques of brain imaging are used in the clinical setting, and how the images are interpreted.

A danger inherent in popular science books is that they try to be popular and so simplify too much. The lesson we learn from the theatre, and from Shakespeare's plays in particular, is that complex ideas and emotions can be effectively communicated to a receptive audience, even if the language is unfamiliar. The large audiences at Brain Awareness Week indicate overwhelmingly their eagerness to learn about the brain, but if these audiences leave with the impression that scientists have discovered that communication between humans arises from coloured blobs in our left hemispheres, then we have missed the essential humanity of brain sciences. Encouragingly, the dialogue between brain researchers and their lay audiences is growing, thanks in good measure to the Dana Alliance, so, strangely enough, things will probably turn out well. How? I don't know. It's a mystery.