"Works from Shakespeare, Chaucer, Wordsworth and D H Lawrence challenge readers because of their unusual words, tricky sentence structure and the repetition of phrases," reports the Daily Telegraph.
English professors at Liverpool University who teamed up with neuroscientists armed with brain-imaging equipment found that this challenge causes the brain to light up with electrical activity. Professor Philip Davis, who led the study at the university's department of English, said: "The brain appears to become baffled by something unexpected in the text that jolts it into a higher level of thinking.
The researchers "were also able to identify that the Shakespeare sparked activity across a far wider area of the brain than 'plain' text, with the greatest concentration in a key area associated with language in the temporal lobe known as the Sylvian Fissure."
