Neuri lit crit

Or, scanning brains to determine why we like to read.

A Guardian report says: "'Neuro lit crit' is the study of how great writing affects the hard wiring inside our heads. But can we decode the artistic impulse?"

"It is the cutting edge of literary studies, a rapidly expanding field that is blending scientific processes with the study of literature and other forms of fiction. Some have dubbed it "the science of reading" and it is shaking up the one of the most esoteric and sometimes impenetrable corners of academia. Forget structuralism or even post-structuralist deconstructionism. "Neuro lit crit" is where it's at."

Or, as the colonel said to the caterpillar: "Hurrmph."

According to the story, 12 students in New England, belonging to a group called the Yale-Haskins Teagle Collegium, headed by Yale literature professor Michael Holquist will, later this year, be given a series of specially designed texts to read. They will then be loaded into a hospital MRI machine and have their brains scanned and mapped to determine their neurological responses.

But do neurological responses of the brain of people who read Marcel Proust, Henry James or Virginia Woolf differ from those who read only newspapers or Harry Potter books? Is there a Darwinian dimension to literature? Did evolution influence literature or did literature influence evolution? "It is hard to interpret fiction without an evolutionary view," says Professor Jonathan Gottschall of Washington and Jefferson College, Pennsylvania.

The Yale-Haskins Teagle Collegium certainly thinks so. Professor Richard Wise, a neuroscientist at Imperial College London says,"Reading is a very hard-wired thing in our brains. There are brain cells that respond to reading and we can study them."

The Guardian