The Guardian reports on a neuroscientist's attempt to find out whether and how the brains of actors work differently from those of the rest of us. The grande dame Fiona Shaw was wired up to a scanner and asked to recite some lines from TS Eliot. The results were revelatory:
But what really excites Scott is the parts of the brain Shaw was using for the poetry. "In addition to all the parts of the brain associated with motor skills, like moving the tongue or lips, she used a part of the brain associated with analysing or doing a complex transformation of a visual image. If I told you to imagine the figure 8, turn it through 90 degrees, and then think of it as a pair of glasses – that's the extra part Fiona was using when she was performing the text."
This part of the brain has the funtime name infra parietal sulkus. "Interestingly, it's not the part used by non-professionals when they try to produce a voice," Scott says. "Actors do it in a very different way from you or me. When I started doing this research I came from a phonetics background where you break speech down, analyse it and build it up again. But professionals don't. They're doing something much more visceral and bodily."
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