Before clinical depression was first diagnosed, a person afflicted with the condition was referred to as melancholy. It was believed that our physical and emotional states were determined by the distribution of the four humours, or bodily fluids, each of which had a different effect if it fell out of balance. If you had an excess of black bile, for example, you were melancholic, and would seem moody and sad. Today, we understand this to be depression, but in Shakespeare’s time, the humours were the best science of the day, and the affliction was called melancholy.

Melancholy can be found throughout Shakespeare. Don John begins Much Ado About Nothing in a sadness. Hamlet is definitely depressed, and is often given the nickname The Melancholy Dane. You might argue that they both have reason to be. But Antonio’s first line of The Merchant of Venice, in fact the first line of the play, “In sooth, I know not why I am so sad,” leaves little doubt that Shakespeare was familiar with the concept of clinical depression by another name.

After Hamlet, perhaps the most famous melancholic in Shakespeare is Jaques from As You Like It. He is referred to in the play as “the melancholy Jaques” and even seems to take some pleasure in the description himself. From this, we might gather that he is depressed as well. But I would actually argue that he’s bipolar.

Bipolar disorder (which also used to be misdiagnosed as melancholy) is characterized by extreme mood swings between depression and bursts of manic energy. People with bipolar disorder used to be called manic depressive. And even though it wasn’t known about in Shakespeare’s time, Shakespeare must have been aware of different ways that “melancholy” affected certain people, and wrote Jaques as bipolar. How else can we explain the outburst by “the melancholy Jaques” in the beginning of Act 2, Scene 7:

A fool, a fool! I met a fool i’ the forest,
A motley fool; a miserable world!
As I do live by food, I met a fool;
Who laid him down and bask’d him in the sun,
And rail’d on Lady Fortune in good terms,
In good set terms, and yet a motley fool.
“Good morrow, fool,” quoth I. “No, sir,” quoth he,
“Call me not fool till heaven hath sent me fortune.”
And then he drew a dial from his poke,
And, looking on it with lack-lustre eye,
Says very wisely, “It is ten o’clock;
Thus may we see,” quoth he, “how the world wags:
“Tis but an hour ago since it was nine,
And after one hour more ’twill be eleven;
And so, from hour to hour we ripe and ripe,
And then from hour to hour we rot and rot,
And thereby hangs a tale.” When I did hear
The motley fool thus moral on the time,
My lungs began to crow like chanticleer,
That fools should be so deep-contemplative,
And I did laugh sans intermission
An hour by his dial. O noble fool!
A worthy fool! Motley’s the only wear.

Does that sound depressed to you? Does it sound neutral? Or does it sound manic? In addition to the numerous exclamation points, the exaggerated repetition (used as an emphatic) and run-on sentences (notice how many lines begin with “And”) seem to indicate manic speech patterns. Hamlet doesn’t have any speeches like that, or if he does, they are soliloquies, and can be more closely equated to the thoughts racing through his own mind than to his behavior in public.

Depression is marked by listlessness and inaction. Hamlet is almost defined by his inaction. He is withdrawn and other characters must come to him. But throughout As You Like It, Jaques actively seeks out relationships and interactions with the other characters, first with Amiens and the other lords, then with Touchstone (off-stage), then with the Duke Senior and his assembly, then with Orlando (!), then with Touchstone again, then with Ganymede/Rosalind (!!), and finally with Duke Frederick (!!!). He may be bitter and dismissive, but he can hardly be called aloof or withdrawn. When we first hear of Jaques, he is being mocked by his friends for his melancholy, but their story is of an extremely compassionate and sensitive soul who weeps for a wounded deer.

Jaques: Melancholic, Misunderstood, Bipolar.

Oh yeah, and Bottom from A Midsummer Night’s Dream clearly has adult ADHD with delusions of grandeur. A topic, perhaps, for another time.

A few days ago, I included a long discussion about the brain in a post about Daniel Tammet, the mildly-autistic, but highly-savant “Brain Man” of Britain. I’m aware that some of you may still have some questions about the way the brain is configured. As a public service, it is my pleasure to provide this illumination from one of the world’s leading authorities on the brain.

This week, 60 Minutes did a fascinating piece on a remarkable young man named Daniel Tammet:

Twenty-four years ago, 60 Minutes introduced viewers to George Finn, whose talent was immortalized in the movie “Rainman.” George has a condition known as savant syndrome, a mysterious disorder of the brain where someone has a spectacular skill, even genius, in a mind that is otherwise extremely limited.

Morley Safer met another savant, Daniel Tammet, who is called “Brain Man” in Britain. But unlike most savants, he has no obvious mental disability, and most important to scientists, he can describe his own thought process. He may very well be a scientific Rosetta stone, a key to understanding the brain.

Tammet has a condition known as synesthesia, which is when the brain gets its wires crossed, and two or more senses overlap. In some cases, days of the week might seem to the afflicted to have their own personalities (as they do here at Shakespeare Teacher). In other cases, particular years might, for an individual, occupy specific locations in space. In Tammet’s case, he can actually see numbers.

“I see numbers in my head as colors and shapes and textures. So when I see a long sequence, the sequence forms landscapes in my mind,” Tammet explains. “Every number up to 10,000, I can visualize in this way, has it’s own color, has it’s own shape, has it’s own texture.”

For Tammet, 289 is an ugly number. He describes 333 as very beautiful. Pi is “one of the most beautiful things in all the world.” In fact, Tammet holds the European record for reciting the digits of pi from memory, rattling off 22,514 digits without error in just over 5 hours. In my very best attempt, I have not been able to recite half that many.

Fans of the blog know me as an armchair brain science researcher, so I’m naturally fascinated by the idea of synesthesia. What other forms might it take? Could there be people who can smell the letters of the alphabet? Would a metaphor have a different taste than a hyperbole? Could you fall in love with a time of day? And would all people with the same kinds of synesthesia map their senses out the same way? We all know what a green square looks like, but would another person with Tammet’s brand of synesthesia agree with him about what 2,192 looks like? In other words, does 2,192 have an inherent visual representation and he’s the only one who can tell us what it looks like, or is his mind inventing its own unique schema to help it make sense of a neural configuration that was never supposed to happen? And if it’s the latter, what is the logic behind that system? Every question leads to more questions. But for scientists – um, real scientists – some of the answers may lie with Tammet himself.

There are maybe 50 savants alive today. These abilities generally go along with some kind of autism, making it difficult for researchers to interview the subjects and learn about the condition. But Tammet’s autism is very mild, and he’s able to articulate his experiences and provide researchers with a unique insight.

Tammet’s abilities, and disabilities, are described in much greater detail in this article in the Guardian from about two years ago, as well as some insight on what brain science researchers hope to gain from working with him:

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre (ARC) at Cambridge University, is interested in what Mänti might teach us about savant ability. “I know of other savants who also speak a lot of languages,” says Baron-Cohen. “But it’s rare for them to be able to reflect on how they do it – let alone create a language of their own.” The ARC team has started scanning Tammet’s brain to find out if there are modules (for number, for example, or for colour, or for texture) that are connected in a way that is different from most of us. “It’s too early to tell, but we hope it might throw some light on why we don’t all have savant abilities.”

The clip below is the second of two from a British documentary about Tammet. You can view the first one here if you’re interested. The clip below is just over eight minutes long. I’m including it here so you can see the first four minutes, where Tammet describes how he “sees” numbers. If you want to watch the last four minutes, though, you can see Tammet meet Kim Peek, the real-life person on whom “Rain Man” is based.

Ever since the post that featured Yakko’s World, I’ve been flooded with e-mails asking for more Animaniacs cartoons. Well, not actual e-mails as such, but I can sense people want them.

Here’s one called Yakko’s Universe:

There has been some Internet buzz over an obnoxious Christopher Hitchen’s piece (is there any other kind) in a recent issue of Vanity Fair. This post isn’t about the piece or the buzz, but if you’re interested, you can read some good responses here and here by people who seem to like Hitchens less than I do and are willing to use more ribald language than I am to say so.

The reason I even bring it up at all is that he cites a study from Stanford University that’s far more worth discussing than anything he has to say about it:

According to a new Stanford University School of Medicine study, gender affects the way a person’s brain responds to humor.

The first-of-its-kind imaging study showed that women activate the parts of the brain involved in language processing and working memory more than men when viewing funny cartoons. Women were also more likely to activate with greater intensity the part of the brain that generates rewarding feelings in response to new experiences.

Okay, that makes sense. The brain is stimulated when it has to readjust to an unexpected outcome to a scenario, like the caption of a cartoon or the punchline of a joke. The result of this dissonance is perceived by our brains as funny, and this study demonstrates that women experience the effect more profoundly than men.

But, wait a minute! Doesn’t that sound a lot like the effect that was described by the University of Liverpool study that I blogged about last week:

Professor Philip Davis, from the University’s School of English, said: “The brain reacts to reading a phrase such as ‘he godded me’ from the tragedy of Coriolanus, in a similar way to putting a jigsaw puzzle together. If it is easy to see which pieces slot together you become bored of the game, but if the pieces don’t appear to fit, when we know they should, the brain becomes excited. By throwing odd words into seemingly normal sentences, Shakespeare surprises the brain and catches it off guard in a manner that produces a sudden burst of activity – a sense of drama created out of the simplest of things.”

Just like a joke! Except that instead of a one-shot deal that makes us laugh, Shakespeare hits us with shift after shift until we’re carried away on a brain-chemical high. When Shakespeare finally gives us a release, it can be extremely intense emotionally. But the two studies appear to be describing the very same process.

So, based on these two studies, one might expect women to be more profoundly affected by Shakespeare than men would be. That is to say that women would feel more intensely the rewarding feelings (Stanford study) that Shakespeare’s use of language has been demonstrated to generate (Liverpool study).

I don’t mean to be an armchair brain science researcher or anything, but this might make for an interesting follow-up study. And clearly, some informal preliminary field research on my part is in order immediately.

There’s a good article in this week’s Economist about Mongolia’s dispute with China over which of the two peoples are the true heirs of Genghis Khan:

In a country of only 2.7m people scattered over an area four times the size of Germany, national heroes are few and far between. This makes it all the more galling that Genghis is claimed by China too. Unlike the Russians, the Chinese have got round their subjugation by the Mongols by insisting he was one of their own. Genghis’s grandson, Kublai Khan, founded China’s Yuan dynasty in the 13th century. That, in China’s view, makes Genghis himself an honorary Chinese emperor.

The dispute was apparently sparked by a new Genghis Khan theme park. Is it possible that Khan is viewed differently over there than he is over here?

Anyway, what drew me to this article was that it reminded me of a study published a few years ago, also concerned with the legacy of Genghis Khan:

An international group of geneticists studying Y-chromosome data have found that nearly 8 percent of the men living in the region of the former Mongol empire carry y-chromosomes that are nearly identical. That translates to 0.5 percent of the male population in the world, or roughly 16 million descendants living today.

16 million descendants. And that’s only men descended from Khan directly through the male line, father to son, for the past 800 years. The total number of Khan’s descendants living today is truly incalculable.

So, China and Mongolia should probably stop arguing over which of their people are the true heirs of Genghis Khan. My guess is, almost all of them are.

According to a new study, Shakespeare is good for your brain:

Reading Shakespeare excites the brain in a way that keeps it “fit”, researchers say.

A team from the University of Liverpool is investigating whether wrestling with the innovative use of language could help to prevent dementia.

More details here.

In this new year, let’s all make a promise to ourselves to read Shakespeare on a regular basis. It’s the responsible thing to do.