Light through yonder mind breaks
"To be, or not to be: That is the question."
— Hamlet
By Kathleen Fackelmann
USA Today
That line, written by William Shakespeare, captivates readers because people enjoy the cadence and poetry of a well-written sentence.
Hamlet's famous speech also illustrates the 17th-century English playwright's keen observations of the human brain and the way it works — to consider the human condition, to experience the joy of first love, or to ponder a moral choice.
That range of human experience is the subject of intense scientific investigation as neuroscientists literally map the human brain and discover the neural basis for despair, rage, love and joy. Now neuroscientist Paul Matthews and Shakespeare scholar Jeffrey McQuain have used Shakespeare to illustrate the brave new world of neuroscience.
The resulting book, "The Bard on the Brain: Understanding the Mind Through the Art of Shakespeare and the Science of Brain Imaging" (Dana Press, $35), pairs classic Shakespeare themes such as depression, old age, love and revenge with 21st-century science, complete with color images showing the human brain as it works to produce such emotions.
"That pairing offers readers a richer understanding of what it means to be fully alive," says Gail Kern Paster, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. Shakespeare is a perfect choice for such a book because he explored diseases such as epilepsy and Alzheimer's as well as the normal development of the human mind — like the formation of a first memory, she says.
For example, in "The Tempest," Miranda, a teenager at the time the play opens, suddenly remembers a scene from her childhood. She says she recalls having several women tending to her on their island home, but she says the memory is "far off, And rather dream like."
That scene accurately describes the way a 3-year-old encodes or lays down an early memory, one typically later filled in by details supplied by others. Scientists now know that those imperfectly formed first memories are the result of a brain not fully developed, says Matthews, of the University of Oxford in England.
Using brain-imaging devices, scientists see that music activates many regions of the brain, including those involved in generating feelings of pleasure. Shakespeare seemed to understand the connection well enough, as seen in the romantic play "Twelfth Night."
In that play, Orsino, duke of Illyria, tries to court the countess Olivia but is rejected. To soothe his lovesick heart, Orsino listens to music and says:
"If music be the food of love, play on."
Neuroscientists are exploring the link between music and pleasure, Matthews says, because a better understanding of what makes humans feel good might help researchers find better treatments for depression and other mood disorders.
Shakespeare wrote his plays from a small English village during the Elizabethan period, a time of great scientific exploration, Kern Paster says. Today's neuroscientists also stand at the edge of a new frontier: They know that billions of neurons in the brain "talk" to one another, producing the thoughts, emotions and behaviors Shakespeare so aptly described.
Imaging devices now can take pictures of a human brain under the influence of a depression or wracked by the onslaught of Alzheimer's. Such advances have led to a better understanding of how disease affects the brain. And in many cases, doctors have therapies for disorders that went untreated in Shakespeare's day.
The hope is that such advances will lead to even greater progress against diseases that continue to cause human suffering — like the depression that tortured Lady Macbeth along with her husband, who had to stand by and watch his wife wander about in the grip of madness.
When the anguished Macbeth can't take it any more, he implores a doctor to help his wife, saying:
"Cure her of that. Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd?"
Macbeth's plea stands today as an urgent reminder of the scientific progress yet to be made.
