EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Shakespeare’s Triggers

One of Shakespeare’s semantic tricks is to change the function of a word but still have it make sense.  In the lines “To lip a wanton in a secure couch / And to suppose her chaste” the noun lip becomes a verb while wanton, an adjective, becomes a noun. Other examples are “Strong wines thick my thoughts” or “We waited for disclose of news.” Philip Davis wondered a few years ago whether part of the power of Shakespeare’s lines, the pleasure they give the brain, was in no small part due to these intentional errors that still make sense. He managed to find a neurologist to do a brain imaging study and tested four different types of lines to see what lit up inside the brain. It was already known that when someone hears a semantic error the cerebral cortex has what is called an N400 effect. Likewise a syntactic error has a P600 effect. Thus, when they tested the line “You said you would charcoal me” the brain registers both effects because charcoal is neither a verb nor does it make much sense. However when they tested “You said you would companion me”, a Shakepearian-like line, the brains registered a high P600 (because the grammar is wrong) but no N400 because the line makes sense. There’s no way to know yet whether that higher-than-normal P600 effect with no N400 are the triggers that give the listener’s brain so much pleasure. Nevertheless the results do seem to imply that Shakespeare was right in thinking that using language in that manner results in a unique reaction within the brain.¹ Does this apply to art?

Many of the explanations on this site demonstrate that what the viewer initially takes as an error in a painting is the piece that makes the real scene make sense. The presumed scene – the one understood that way for centuries in some cases – was never valid. Michelangelo’s Last Judgment and Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe are good examples, as is Manet’s Mlle V in the Costume of an Espada. When viewers perceive the compositions the correct way for the first time, many report intense aesthetic pleasure, a shock-reaction to discovering that what they took for granted for so long was completely mistaken while the “errors” they were used to seeing now make sense. There are no strict parallels in visual art to semantic and syntactic mistakes in literature. Vision takes place in a different part of the brain anyway. Nevertheless, artists seem to incorporate features that they know will be considered “errors” but which when viewed properly form new and more important meaning. That seems somewhat analogous to what Shakespeare did. It is also the new meaning resulting from the “errors” that so often unites each artwork with the canon. One day, I have no doubt, science will tell us more about the neural triggers that wash our minds in waves of aesthetic satisfaction.

 

 

1. 1. Philip Davis, “The Shakespeared Brain” , Intelligent Life and at www.moreintelligentlife.com/story/the-shakespeared-brain, March 7^th 2008