Dame Judi has reams of poetry in her head and, like the Duchess, agrees that it’s the stuff with rhythm and rhyme that’s easiest to remember. ‘Shakespeare’s verse goes with the beat of your heart,’ she says – and she’s right.
Which brings us to the science – and Professor Goswami.
On that same sunny September afternoon, I left Dame Judi and her friend Pen learning lines in the garden and made my way to Cambridge and the Memory Laboratory at Cambridge University’s Department for Neuroscience in Education. There I found my poetry-by-heart guru: Professor Usha Goswami, Fellow of the British Academy and multi-award-winning professor of Cognitive Developmental Neuroscience.
In a nutshell, the research undertaken by Professor Goswami and her team provides measurable proof of what my gut instinct has long told me: as you start out in life, having your parents recite poetry and sing songs to you will help you with your linguistic skills; as you grow older, learning poetry will keep dementia at bay.
You will find the detail in the professor’s learned paper: ‘A Neural Basis for Phonological Awareness? An Oscillatory Temporal-Sampling Perspective’, published by the Association of Psychological Science. To cut to the chase, Professor Goswami has been studying and measuring what goes on inside the brains of babies and young children – measuring the neural oscillations (the brainwaves, as it were) that encode the signals through which we begin to learn and understand speech. The metrical structures and rhythmic patterns of nursery rhymes coincide with the brain’s neural oscillations – starting with a trochaic rhythm (as in the beat of ‘The cat sat on the mat’) and quickly going on to the rhythm of the iambic pentameter (as in the ‘da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM’ of Shakespearean verse) which explains why Dame Judi could indeed quite easily have been speaking Shakespeare from the age of three or four.
The professor and her team can measure the speech-sound awareness of babies, toddlers and young children and, on the basis of the data, accurately predict speech, reading and even spelling development.
Essentially, what the professor’s studies of the ‘rhythmic synchronization across modalities’ establish is that the more you recite poetry to your children – before they are born as well as when they are babies and toddlers – the better they will be able to communicate, both when it comes to spoken and, later, even written language.
And why do we remember best the poems we learnt as children, I asked the professor. ‘First in, last out, is the principle of it,’ she explained, trying to put it in layman’s terms for me. And why is the stuff we’ve learnt later more difficult to recall? ‘It’s all still in there,’ she said, reassuringly. ‘It’s just sometimes difficult to retrieve because there is so much in there.’
The brain is a computer into which we are loading more and more stuff as the years go by. Those infamous ‘senior moments’ occur not because we have lost anything, but because it has been temporarily mislaid. It’s a retrieval issue, not a memory one. Concentrate and focus and you should be able to bring it back.
‘At whatever age you are,’ according to Professor Goswami, ‘you still have the capacity to learn new things if you put your mind to it. There’s no shortage of brain cells as you grow older.’
Recent research from the Department of Neurobiology at Columbia University has established that new brain cells grow as quickly when you are in your seventies as when you are in your twenties. Remembering things, it seems, does not have to get more difficult as you grow older. According to the scientists at Columbia, gradual mental decline ‘is not the inevitable process many of us think it is’. The researchers made their discovery after counting the number of new cells growing in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that processes memories and emotions.
The cerebrum is the largest part of the brain. It controls our personality, vision and hearing. It contains a range of brain structures including the hippocampus and the cerebral cortex. The cortex controls a number of advanced mental functions like language and planning. The hippocampus is where memories are stored and processed. The scientists at Columbia found that around seven hundred brain cells were created each day in the hippocampus, even in the oldest people they studied, and that there was no difference in the hippocampus in young and old brains.
Back at Cambridge University, Professor Goswami is unequivocal: learning poetry by heart is good for the brain. ‘So it’s true what they say,’ I suggested to her. ‘The brain is a muscle: if you don’t use it, you lose it.’ ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘You’ve got to keep the brain active. I have colleagues here at Cambridge in their seventies, eighties and nineties – none of them has dementia. The exercise and discipline of learning a poem by heart is certainly going to help keep dementia at bay.’
Did you hear that? There is no excuse. If you want to do it, you can.
When I was a boy, one of my heroines was the great English actress Dame Sybil Thorndike. When I lived with my parents in London, Dame Sybil lived near us and we used to see her sometimes waiting at the bus stop. She was a keen Christian Socialist and a natural enthusiast. ‘Oh Lewis,’ she said to her husband, Lewis Casson, when they were both in their eighties, ‘if only we could be the first actors to play on the moon!’ She lived into her nineties and famously made herself learn a new poem every day to keep her brain active.
Learning lines is good for you – and doable whatever your age. Dame Judi Dench, born in December 1934, is learning hers for her next film right now. As I write this, Dame Maggie Smith, also born in December 1934, is appearing in a new one-woman play in which she speaks, without pause, for one hour and three-quarters. Dame Eileen Atkins, their senior by six months, is currently appearing in a new play on Broadway. Glenda Jackson, eighty-three, is appearing in an old one – King Lear. They are all word perfect, of course. And my friend, Nicholas Parsons, born in October 1923, is not only as razor-sharp as ever on the BBC radio programme, Just A Minute, he is also touring the United Kingdom with his Lear – not a production of Shakespeare’s great tragedy, but a one-man show about the poet and artist, Edward Lear, in which Nicholas, aged ninety-six, recites poem after poem after poem – and doesn’t hesitate or deviate once.
The evidence is there. Learning poetry by heart will give you a happier, richer, longer, mentally active life. Go for it.
‘How pleasant to know Mr Lear!’
by Edward Lear
(1812–88)
‘How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!’
Who has written such volumes of stuff!
Some think him ill-tempered and queer,
But a few think him pleasant enough.
His mind is concrete and fastidious,
His nose is remarkably big;
His visage is more or less hideous,
His beard it resembles a wig.
He has ears, and two eyes, and ten fingers,
Leastways if you reckon two thumbs;
Long ago he was one of the singers,
But now he is one of the dumbs.
He sits in a beautiful parlour,
With hundreds of books on the wall;
He drinks a great deal of Marsala,
But never gets tipsy at all.
He has many friends, laymen and clerical,
Old Foss is the name of his cat:
His body is perfectly spherical,
He weareth a runcible hat.
When he walks in a waterproof white,
The children run after him so!
Calling out, ‘He’s come out in his night-
Gown, that crazy old Englishman, oh!’
He weeps by the side of the ocean,
He weeps on the top of the hill;
He purchases pancakes and lotion,
And chocolate shrimps from the mill.
He reads but he cannot speak Spanish,
He cannot abide ginger-beer:
Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish,
How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!
CHAPTER TWO
Thanks for the Mem
oryIt’s all in the mind
Everything you think and feel and do, everything you experience, everything you remember – it all starts in the brain, a pinkish-grey blob of matter that sits inside your skull and makes you who you are.
Your brain is the size of a cantaloupe melon and has the texture of mozzarella. The average brain weighs around 1.5 kilograms (that’s 3lbs to older readers), with female brains coming in around 10 per cent lighter, so clearly it is a myth that the bigger your brain the brighter you are.
When Albert Einstein, the great Nobel Prize-winning physicist who gave the world the theory of relativity, died in Princeton Hospital in 1955, the pathologist on duty stole the great man’s brain and took it to Philadelphia for an autopsy. It turned out that Einstein’s brain was a touch smaller than the average. It seems, after all, that size doesn’t matter: it’s quality that counts.
Within your brain is a network of some 86 billion neurons, the nerve cells that are the building blocks of the brain and transmit information using electrical and chemical signals, enabling you to think, feel, taste, sense and remember. This neural network is made up of around 170,000 kilometres of nerve fibre – enough to get you around the earth four times, with 10,000 kilometres to spare. What Einstein appears to have had is a marginally smaller-than-average brain with very efficient neural networks, enabling his nifty neurons to communicate with one another at greater speed and in fewer steps than most other mortals. Einstein was ‘quick-witted’ – literally so.
Einstein was born, incidentally, on 14 March, so he shares a birthday with Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter, as well as with my wife, Michèle, the poet Pam Ayres and the film actor, Sir Michael Caine. Not a lot of people know that.
14 March 1879
by Tom Stoppard
(born 1937)
Einstein born
Quite unprepared
For E to equal
MC squared
The human brain is amazing. Even for those of us not in the Einstein class, it is reckoned our brains can process a quadrillion computations per second. According to Professor Paul Reber, the memory man at Northwestern University in Illinois, if your average brain was a digital video recorder, its information-processing capacity would be sufficient to hold three million hours’ worth of television programmes. You would need to leave it running continuously for more than three hundred years to use up all its storage.
The brain is the centre of the nervous system and controls all the other organ systems of the body, both the voluntary and the involuntary (like the beating of your heart). Almost all animals possess some type of brain, but they differ in size and complexity. Dolphins and chimps have relatively big brains. Cats and elephants have relatively small ones. Jellyfish and starfish have no brains at all.
Our closest living relatives in the animal world are chimpanzees. They share 96 per cent of our DNA – but they do not speak. Language is what makes us human beings unique. Some parrots can mimic human speech, but they cannot speak of their own accord. Birds and beasts may inspire poetry (see Chapter Seven on page 124), but they can’t create it. As another noted brainbox, the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell, observed: ‘No matter how eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were poor, but honest.’ Only words can do that.
Language is power. You can communicate with a hug or an emoji, but you need words for the complex and the subtle stuff.
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.
Matthew Arnold (1822–88)
Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
Carl Sandburg (1878–1967)
Too many people in the modern world view poetry as a luxury, not a necessity like petrol. But to me it’s the oil of life.
John Betjeman (1906–84)
Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.
Allen Ginsberg (1926–97)
You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what’s in your heart.
Carol Ann Duffy (born 1955)
According to the scientists, 80 per cent of our mental experiences are verbal. You can feel the warmth of the sun on your back without words, but in your head you’re probably saying to yourself, ‘That’s nice.’ We articulate our thoughts with language and, intriguingly, language itself affects our perception. Saying the word ‘sunshine’ can make you feel warmer and sunnier. Words can trigger moods and memories and visual images. Given that I am British and of a certain vintage, saying the word ‘sunshine’ in my head as I typed it just now made me think at once of two of my favourite comedians, Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise, kicking up their feet while singing their signature song, ‘Bring Me Sunshine’, originally written for the American singer and poet, Willie Nelson.
Bring me Sunshine, in your smile,
Bring me Laughter, all the while,
In this world where we live, there should be more happiness,
So much joy you can give, to each brand new bright tomorrow,
Make me happy, through the years,
Never bring me, any tears,
Let your arms be as warm as the sun from up above,
Bring me fun, bring me sunshine, bring me love.
Arthur Kent (1920– 2009) and Sylvia Dee (1914– 67)
Hugging your bump before your baby is born, in the Meghan Markle manner, is probably more comforting to you than it is to your unborn child. What makes the real difference to your future offspring is talking to it out loud throughout your pregnancy, but especially during months seven, eight and nine – the third trimester. Your baby will recognize your voice – and the language you use. (There is evidence that a new-born baby will suck more vigorously when hearing its mother’s language than a foreign one.) From twenty-two to twenty-four weeks of gestation, an unborn baby’s memory is beginning to form: it is becoming accustomed to experiences. From thirty weeks onwards, it is beginning to recognize and remember things, like its mother’s voice and her smell.
Yes, you can be born with memories – of a voice, a smell, a piece of music – but, curiously, few adults can recall specific moments from before their third birthday. (My wife claims to remember sitting in her high chair aged two, being fed something orange from the end of a spoon – but my wife is exceptional in more ways than one.) Of course, we are remembering things from before we are born onwards: we are learning how to move and how to communicate, we are learning what we like and don’t like, and remembering what we are learning. If we are learning so much so quickly – and remembering it – when we are so young, why can’t we recall stuff that happened to us before we were about three? The research suggests that the number of neurons being created in the brain cells of infants (and the rapidity of their creation) may interfere with the storage of long-term memories.
You may recall little or nothing of what was happening to you as a baby, but you will certainly have vivid memories of what happened to you in your teens. Apparently, most of us have the keenest recollections of our adolescent years – when we first fell in love, when we left school and launched ourselves into the world, when we said goodbye to childhood. The people in the memory business call this period in our lives ‘the reminiscence bump’.
The American comedian, Bob Hope, first sang ‘Thanks for the memory’ in 1938. When I saw him on stage, at the Royal Albert Hall in 1994, he was ninety-one and his memory wa
sn’t what it used to be. His sensory memory was fine, but his semantic memory, short-term memory, working memory and long-term memory were fraying at the edges. As he said in his act, ‘George Burns and I are now so old we get together on a Saturday night, have a few drinks and try to get in touch with the living.’ Hope and Burns both lived to be a hundred, but Burns’s synapses stayed peppier longer.
A synapse is the junction between neurons. A neuron is the nerve cell that transmits information using chemical and electrical signals.
We have five traditional senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. Sensory memory is a very brief memory that allows you to retain impressions of sensory information after the original stimulus has ceased.
Short-term memory does what it says on the tin: keeps the memory in place briefly. Your short-term memory can hold a small amount of information (typically around seven items – a phone number or an address) in mind and ready to use in an active form for a short space of time (typically around fifteen seconds, sometimes up to a minute). For example, to understand a sentence as you hear it, the beginning of the sentence has to be kept in mind while the rest is spoken. The information then disappears unless you make a conscious effort to retain it and so transfer your short-term memory into a long-term memory.
Dancing by the Light of the Moon Page 2