Susan Celia Greenfield, Associate Professor of English, Fordham University and Public Voices Fellow with the Op-Ed Project, does research on Jane Austen.
In a recent study of readers of Austen, it appears as if Austen is making news in the field of neuroscience.
Here is an excerpt of a recent Greenfield blog post:
The Stanford Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological
Imaging (
CNi)
has been tracking the blood flow patterns in the brains of Austen
readers. How? By having literature graduate students read the second
chapter of
Mansfield Park while getting brain images using fMRI
(functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging). The subjects were asked to
alternate styles, reading some passages for pleasure and others with the
kind of close critical attention required in literature courses like my
own. The preliminary results surprised the researchers. Not only does
close reading create a distinctly different blood flow pattern in the
brain, but it also activates diverse regions that stretch far beyond
those associated with attention, in one example, even reaching into
areas generally dedicated to physical activity. You may think you are
sitting still with a book. Your brain does not.
As it happens, Austen has a particularly effective technique for representing a character's consciousness (or for creating the
fiction
that such a thing exists). Known as free indirect discourse, or FID,
the technique allows the narrator to enter a character's mind and adopt
the language of her thoughts while retaining the objectivity of a
third-person point of view. It is like a special lens that can
simultaneously zoom inside consciousness and zoom out and see it from a
distance. An MRI machine records activation in parts of the brain the
subject isn't even aware of. FID represents aspects of a character's
thoughts that the character herself does not know.
Such immersion in a character is one version of what Natalie Phillips, Assistant Professor of English at Michigan State University, and a co-director of the neuroscience study,
describes as reading for pleasure. When she and her colleagues were
first designing their experiment, they ran a pilot that put literature
professors in the MRI. As Natalie explained to
Laura Miller from
Salon,
"One thing we realized immediately... is that professors are terrible
subjects!" On the phone with me she added, "We don't know how to read
for pleasure anymore."
"And we definitely do not know how to do it in an MRI scanner!"
