de Gelder, B.

Hadjikhani, N.K.

English

NARCIS 

Shakespeare on the brain, Vivaldi on the weather, and Darwin on docu-soap?

Tilburg University Repository

    Tilburg UniversityShakespeare on the brain, Vivaldi on the weather, and Darwin on docu-soap?de Gelder, B.; Hadjikhani, N.K.Published in:Trends in Cognitive SciencePublication date:2003Link to publication in Tilburg University Research PortalCitation for published version (APA):de Gelder, B., & Hadjikhani, N. K. (2003). Shakespeare on the brain, Vivaldi on the weather, and Darwin ondocu-soap? Trends in Cognitive Science, 7(11), 479-480.General rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright ownersand it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.            • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research.            • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain            • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portalTake down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediatelyand investigate your claim.Download date: 26. Sep. 2023Shakespeare on the brain, Vivaldi on the weather, andDarwin on docu-soap?The Bard on the Brain: Understanding the Mind Through the Art of Shakespeare and the Science of Brain Imaging byPaul M. Matthews and Jeffrey McQuain, University of Chicago Press, 2003. £21.99/$35.00 (192 pages) ISBN 0 97238 302 6Beatrice de Gelder and Nouchine HadjikhaniMGH-NMR Center, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, Boston, MA 02119, USALike all great artists Shakespeare isuniversally credited with deep andeternal insights into the human soul.In The Bard on the Brain, Paul Mat-thews, a neurologist and director of theOxford Centre for Functional MagneticImaging of the Brain, and JeffreyMcQuain, an author and researcher in literary studieshave taken up the challenge to show how many of thoseinsights are already substantiated by research in cognitiveneuroscience using the recent technology allowing in vivoobservation of brain activity.Materials selected are grouped around seven themeswith chapters like ‘Minds and Brains’, ‘Decision andAction’, ‘Our Inner World’, and ‘Drugs and the Brain’. Ineach chapter the same recipe is used to obtain a colourfulcocktail. Presentation consists of some initial introductorylines, followed by famous excerpts from well-known playsof the Bard and a selection of photographs showing actorsat crucial turns in the dialogue together with artisticrendering of brain maps. Following the quotes are smallessays of varying quality that try to build bridges betweenShakespeare’s words and the images of brain activation.The selection of Chapter topics is naturally quitepredictable, as the leading theme is the human condition.Similarly, the choice of passages quoted from each of theplays is in most cases not altogether that surprising.Unfortunately, in many cases the links are quite artificialand clumsy, and contain numerous clichés. In other casesthe effort to present brain imaging on, say, bilingualism,numerical cognition, or language and semantics, over-stretches the reader’s imagination, because a direct rela-tion to the big themes perceived in Shakespeare’s plays –life, love, the passing of time and death – is certainly lessthan obvious.Taking Shakespeare’s work as the leading thread toexplore the different themes that have been studied by20th century neuroscientists is certainly an interestingapproach, but a more thorough method than used heremight have lead to something more interesting for readersat different levels. After having had a pleasant lookthrough this book, we still wonder whether the attemptto try to bring arts and science closer together is reallysomething that needs to be pursued. Nothing new reallyemerges from this side-by-side comparison; lovers ofShakespeare’s work will not feel as though they gainednew insights into his work, and scientists will not find anynew useful information.In a book that is devoted in part to ‘the Science of BrainImaging’ one would have hoped that the imaging tech-niques used to produce the illustrations of brain activationwould be better introduced. Many of the figures wererendered in a way that might make them look better tosome but also makes them very difficult to read andinterpret. Moreover, a blatant mistake such as that in thecaption of Figure 9, where what actually represents dif-ferent visual areas is described as being brain activationsfor the left or the right visual field, is quite surprising.Having looked at these images, the naı̈ve reader couldbe left with the impression that these nice colored areas onthe brain actually correspond to something to do with whatShakespeare says about the complexity and the subtletyof the human psyche. This would be more than a littlemisleading – we are actually a long way from this levelof understanding in neuroscience, even if the progresstowards it during the past decade has been amazing. Ofcourse, there is an inherent danger of oversimplificationin any book that tries to be accessible to a broad public.But the problems here run deeper. In fact, they are wellenshrined in the title – was Shakespeare really interestedin the brain? Or was it the mind he was after and was thebrain a metaphor for the mind in Shakespeare’s days, asit is in the present? This mind/brain confusion is quiteapparent in some of the brain research quoted and theShakespearean context in which it is presented here.As much as the authors state that we are at the dawnof a new Enlightenment, it is not clear what the secondEnlightenment is going to be about. The seamless tran-sition from ‘mind talk’ to ‘brain talk’ brain opens up agigantic can of worms that have neither been eradicatednot metamorphosed into butterflies by the new brainimaging methods. In any event, the Bard did not sayanything about the brain – his talk was all about the mind.Mind and brain can be used as synonyms of course, butdoes that mean any more in Shakespeare’s day than it doesnow, other than that the brain is a metaphor for the mind?None of this casts doubt on the impressive achieve-ments of a decade of brain imaging research. An instruc-tive comparison can be made with research on vision.There is no doubt that vision scientists have thrown lighton some of the techniques used by painters and there isno denying that such research is much needed and veryuseful. But clarifying the perceptual basis of paintingtechniques and viewing a painting are two very differentCorresponding author: Beatrice de Gelder (degelder@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu).Update TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.7 No.11 November 2003 479http://tics.trends.comthings. In the same sense Shakespeare is just as littleabout the brain as Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is about theweather, as Malevich reveals about the spiritual depthsof the Russian soul, or as Darwin contains scripts fordocu-soaps.In the end, what strikes us is that, in this book,Shakespeare’s message is read for its factual meaning,that the metaphors are decoded as containing earlysketches of knowledge awaiting long overdue confirmationfrom brain researchers. Surely it is hard to ignore thatShakespeare the playwright did not write these plays justto be read. Plays are conceived to be performed by actorsand to be seen, heard and felt by an audience. Plays are nottreatises on the soul, but scenarios for enacting emotionsand for communicating with an audience in a theatre. Thescenarios only come to life when embodied by actors andwatched by agents. The book misses out on this aspect.But this is not to say that these aren’t matters thancan and will be taken up by scientists soon! In fact, onecan easily imagine a brain imaging study in which theparticipants hear and see fragments of plays reprintedhere. In that case, the next edition of this book wouldbe accompanied with an interactive DVD that allowsus to watch the play while seeing brain scans ofparticipants’ brain activity.1364-6613/$ - see front matter q 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.tics.2003.09.011|LetterWeighing up the facts of category-specific semanticdeficitsHelen E. Moss and Lorraine K. TylerDepartment of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EB, UKCaramazza and Mahon [1] discuss competing theoreticalaccounts of the organization of conceptual knowledge, inthe light of evidence from patients with category-specificsemantic deficits. They conclude that their ‘Domain-Specific’ hypothesis, in which evolutionary factors haveresulted in specialized neural systems for concepts in alimited set of domains, namely animals, fruit andvegetables, conspecifics, and tools, is the only one that isconsistent with the ‘facts’ of category-specific deficits.Although we agree that there are many problems foralternative theories and that none provides a completeaccount of the data, we wish to highlight a fact that is notmentioned by Caramazza and Mahon, but which presentsa challenge to the Domain-Specific hypothesis [2,3].The fact in question is that most patients with category-specific semantic deficits show a graded impairmentrather than an all-or-none dissociation. That is, fewpatients are within the normal range for their ‘preserved’category across all semantic tasks on which they aretested. In support of this point, we cite just a fewillustrative cases – patients ‘JBR’ [4], ‘Michelangelo’ [5]and ‘RC’ [6] – but there are many more. The few cases forwhom performance is consistently within the normalrange for the preserved category – for example, ‘EW’ [7]– are the exception rather than the rule. How wouldgraded impairments arise from a lesion to a distinct,dedicated neural system for a specific category or domain?One possibility is that the neural circuits are close togetherin the brain, so that large and/or diffuse lesions affect morethan one system, but to differing degrees. However, thisargument remains untestable unless precise claims aremade about the neuro-anatomical correlates of theproposed domain specific systems. Although the lesiondata show some broad correlations between bilateralantero-medial and inferior temporal lobe damage andliving things deficits, there is much variation in the extentand location of lesions and the degree of impairment in‘preserved categories’. For example, patient ‘EW’ [7] has ahighly selective deficit for animals – which we mightexpect to be associated with a small focal inferior temporallobe lesion – yet she has a large area of encephlomalaciawithin the left posterior frontal and parietal lobes.Extensive fronto-parietal lesions are more commonlyassociated with artifact deficits.A related point concerns the nature of dissociations inneural activity produced by concepts in different domainsas revealed in functional imaging studies. Caramazza andMahon cite evidence for category- or domain-specificactivations in a number of imaging studies as furthersupport for the Domain-Specific account. However, theregions of interest are rarely selectively recruited by aspecific domain or category; rather, different categoriesproduce activation across many of the same regions, but todifferent degrees [8]. Rather than separate systemsdedicated to individual domains, this suggests thatconcepts within different domains place more or fewerprocessing demands on different elements within a singlesystem [9]. A possible reply to this point is that the domain-specific neural system should be interpreted as arisingfrom a network of connections within pools of neurons thatare common to the processing of many domains, but then itis difficult to see how this differs from a unitary system inwhich category structure emerges as a function of overlapand correlation within concepts.Corresponding author: Helen E. Moss (hem10@cam.ac.uk).Update TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.7 No.11 November 2003480http://tics.trends.com

    Tilburg UniversityShakespeare on the brain, Vivaldi on the weather, and Darwin on docu-soap?de Gelder, B.; Hadjikhani, N.K.Published in:Trends in Cognitive SciencePublication date:2003Link to publication in Tilburg University Research PortalCitation for published version (APA):de Gelder, B., & Hadjikhani, N. K. (2003). Shakespeare on the brain, Vivaldi on the weather, and Darwin ondocu-soap? Trends in Cognitive Science, 7(11), 479-480.General rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright ownersand it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.            • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research.            • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain            • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portalTake down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediatelyand investigate your claim.Download date: 12. May. 2021Shakespeare on the brain, Vivaldi on the weather, andDarwin on docu-soap?The Bard on the Brain: Understanding the Mind Through the Art of Shakespeare and the Science of Brain Imaging byPaul M. Matthews and Jeffrey McQuain, University of Chicago Press, 2003. £21.99/$35.00 (192 pages) ISBN 0 97238 302 6Beatrice de Gelder and Nouchine HadjikhaniMGH-NMR Center, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, Boston, MA 02119, USALike all great artists Shakespeare isuniversally credited with deep andeternal insights into the human soul.In The Bard on the Brain, Paul Mat-thews, a neurologist and director of theOxford Centre for Functional MagneticImaging of the Brain, and JeffreyMcQuain, an author and researcher in literary studieshave taken up the challenge to show how many of thoseinsights are already substantiated by research in cognitiveneuroscience using the recent technology allowing in vivoobservation of brain activity.Materials selected are grouped around seven themeswith chapters like ‘Minds and Brains’, ‘Decision andAction’, ‘Our Inner World’, and ‘Drugs and the Brain’. Ineach chapter the same recipe is used to obtain a colourfulcocktail. Presentation consists of some initial introductorylines, followed by famous excerpts from well-known playsof the Bard and a selection of photographs showing actorsat crucial turns in the dialogue together with artisticrendering of brain maps. Following the quotes are smallessays of varying quality that try to build bridges betweenShakespeare’s words and the images of brain activation.The selection of Chapter topics is naturally quitepredictable, as the leading theme is the human condition.Similarly, the choice of passages quoted from each of theplays is in most cases not altogether that surprising.Unfortunately, in many cases the links are quite artificialand clumsy, and contain numerous clichés. In other casesthe effort to present brain imaging on, say, bilingualism,numerical cognition, or language and semantics, over-stretches the reader’s imagination, because a direct rela-tion to the big themes perceived in Shakespeare’s plays –life, love, the passing of time and death – is certainly lessthan obvious.Taking Shakespeare’s work as the leading thread toexplore the different themes that have been studied by20th century neuroscientists is certainly an interestingapproach, but a more thorough method than used heremight have lead to something more interesting for readersat different levels. After having had a pleasant lookthrough this book, we still wonder whether the attemptto try to bring arts and science closer together is reallysomething that needs to be pursued. Nothing new reallyemerges from this side-by-side comparison; lovers ofShakespeare’s work will not feel as though they gainednew insights into his work, and scientists will not find anynew useful information.In a book that is devoted in part to ‘the Science of BrainImaging’ one would have hoped that the imaging tech-niques used to produce the illustrations of brain activationwould be better introduced. Many of the figures wererendered in a way that might make them look better tosome but also makes them very difficult to read andinterpret. Moreover, a blatant mistake such as that in thecaption of Figure 9, where what actually represents dif-ferent visual areas is described as being brain activationsfor the left or the right visual field, is quite surprising.Having looked at these images, the naı̈ve reader couldbe left with the impression that these nice colored areas onthe brain actually correspond to something to do with whatShakespeare says about the complexity and the subtletyof the human psyche. This would be more than a littlemisleading – we are actually a long way from this levelof understanding in neuroscience, even if the progresstowards it during the past decade has been amazing. Ofcourse, there is an inherent danger of oversimplificationin any book that tries to be accessible to a broad public.But the problems here run deeper. In fact, they are wellenshrined in the title – was Shakespeare really interestedin the brain? Or was it the mind he was after and was thebrain a metaphor for the mind in Shakespeare’s days, asit is in the present? This mind/brain confusion is quiteapparent in some of the brain research quoted and theShakespearean context in which it is presented here.As much as the authors state that we are at the dawnof a new Enlightenment, it is not clear what the secondEnlightenment is going to be about. The seamless tran-sition from ‘mind talk’ to ‘brain talk’ brain opens up agigantic can of worms that have neither been eradicatednot metamorphosed into butterflies by the new brainimaging methods. In any event, the Bard did not sayanything about the brain – his talk was all about the mind.Mind and brain can be used as synonyms of course, butdoes that mean any more in Shakespeare’s day than it doesnow, other than that the brain is a metaphor for the mind?None of this casts doubt on the impressive achieve-ments of a decade of brain imaging research. An instruc-tive comparison can be made with research on vision.There is no doubt that vision scientists have thrown lighton some of the techniques used by painters and there isno denying that such research is much needed and veryuseful. But clarifying the perceptual basis of paintingtechniques and viewing a painting are two very differentCorresponding author: Beatrice de Gelder (degelder@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu).Update TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.7 No.11 November 2003 479http://tics.trends.comthings. In the same sense Shakespeare is just as littleabout the brain as Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is about theweather, as Malevich reveals about the spiritual depthsof the Russian soul, or as Darwin contains scripts fordocu-soaps.In the end, what strikes us is that, in this book,Shakespeare’s message is read for its factual meaning,that the metaphors are decoded as containing earlysketches of knowledge awaiting long overdue confirmationfrom brain researchers. Surely it is hard to ignore thatShakespeare the playwright did not write these plays justto be read. Plays are conceived to be performed by actorsand to be seen, heard and felt by an audience. Plays are nottreatises on the soul, but scenarios for enacting emotionsand for communicating with an audience in a theatre. Thescenarios only come to life when embodied by actors andwatched by agents. The book misses out on this aspect.But this is not to say that these aren’t matters thancan and will be taken up by scientists soon! In fact, onecan easily imagine a brain imaging study in which theparticipants hear and see fragments of plays reprintedhere. In that case, the next edition of this book wouldbe accompanied with an interactive DVD that allowsus to watch the play while seeing brain scans ofparticipants’ brain activity.1364-6613/$ - see front matter q 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.tics.2003.09.011|LetterWeighing up the facts of category-specific semanticdeficitsHelen E. Moss and Lorraine K. TylerDepartment of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EB, UKCaramazza and Mahon [1] discuss competing theoreticalaccounts of the organization of conceptual knowledge, inthe light of evidence from patients with category-specificsemantic deficits. They conclude that their ‘Domain-Specific’ hypothesis, in which evolutionary factors haveresulted in specialized neural systems for concepts in alimited set of domains, namely animals, fruit andvegetables, conspecifics, and tools, is the only one that isconsistent with the ‘facts’ of category-specific deficits.Although we agree that there are many problems foralternative theories and that none provides a completeaccount of the data, we wish to highlight a fact that is notmentioned by Caramazza and Mahon, but which presentsa challenge to the Domain-Specific hypothesis [2,3].The fact in question is that most patients with category-specific semantic deficits show a graded impairmentrather than an all-or-none dissociation. That is, fewpatients are within the normal range for their ‘preserved’category across all semantic tasks on which they aretested. In support of this point, we cite just a fewillustrative cases – patients ‘JBR’ [4], ‘Michelangelo’ [5]and ‘RC’ [6] – but there are many more. The few cases forwhom performance is consistently within the normalrange for the preserved category – for example, ‘EW’ [7]– are the exception rather than the rule. How wouldgraded impairments arise from a lesion to a distinct,dedicated neural system for a specific category or domain?One possibility is that the neural circuits are close togetherin the brain, so that large and/or diffuse lesions affect morethan one system, but to differing degrees. However, thisargument remains untestable unless precise claims aremade about the neuro-anatomical correlates of theproposed domain specific systems. Although the lesiondata show some broad correlations between bilateralantero-medial and inferior temporal lobe damage andliving things deficits, there is much variation in the extentand location of lesions and the degree of impairment in‘preserved categories’. For example, patient ‘EW’ [7] has ahighly selective deficit for animals – which we mightexpect to be associated with a small focal inferior temporallobe lesion – yet she has a large area of encephlomalaciawithin the left posterior frontal and parietal lobes.Extensive fronto-parietal lesions are more commonlyassociated with artifact deficits.A related point concerns the nature of dissociations inneural activity produced by concepts in different domainsas revealed in functional imaging studies. Caramazza andMahon cite evidence for category- or domain-specificactivations in a number of imaging studies as furthersupport for the Domain-Specific account. However, theregions of interest are rarely selectively recruited by aspecific domain or category; rather, different categoriesproduce activation across many of the same regions, but todifferent degrees [8]. Rather than separate systemsdedicated to individual domains, this suggests thatconcepts within different domains place more or fewerprocessing demands on different elements within a singlesystem [9]. A possible reply to this point is that the domain-specific neural system should be interpreted as arisingfrom a network of connections within pools of neurons thatare common to the processing of many domains, but then itis difficult to see how this differs from a unitary system inwhich category structure emerges as a function of overlapand correlation within concepts.Corresponding author: Helen E. Moss (hem10@cam.ac.uk).Update TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.7 No.11 November 2003480http://tics.trends.com

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