The “cutting edge of literary studies” right now is “a rapidly expanding field that is blending scientific processes with the study of literature and other forms of fiction,” say a Guardian report by Paul Harris and Alison Flood. “Forget structuralism or even post-structuralist deconstructionism. ‘Neuro lit crit’ is where it’s at.”

Essentially, “neruo lit crit” is an attempt to understand how great literature impacts the brain. In one study, 12 Yale students “will be given a series of specially designed texts to read. Then they will be loaded into a hospital MRI machine and their brains scanned to map their neurological responses. The scans produced will measure blood flow to the firing synapses of their brain cells, allowing a united team of scientists and literature professors to study how and why human beings respond to complex fiction such as the works of Marcel Proust, Henry James or Virginia Woolf.”

In another study at Stanford University, Profesor Blakey Vermeule “is examining the role of evolution in fiction,” a study dubbed by some as “Darwinian literary studies.”

It looks at how human genetics and evolutionary theory shape and influence literature, or at how literature itself may be an expression of evolution. For instance, the fact that much of human fiction is about the search for a suitable mate should suggest that evolutionary forces are at play. Others agree that fiction can be seen as promoting social cohesion or even giving lessons in sexual selection. “It is hard to interpret fiction without an evolutionary view,” said Professor Jonathan Gottschall at Washington and Jefferson College, Pennsylvania.

Explains neuroscientist Richard Wise of Imperial College London, “Reading is a very hard-wired thing in our brains. There are brain cells that respond to reading and we can study them.”

But not everyone agrees with that.

“It strikes me as just plain silly” says Queens College, Cambridge professor Dr. Ian Patterson. “The mind and the brain are two quite separate things, and nobody knows what the relation is between them.” Dr. Nikolaj Zeuthen, of Aarhus University in Denmark, agrees: “The experience of reading something is subjective, something that we have only private access to. And surely there is nothing electrical, chemical about my experience of reading Woolf. So how can you say anything about my experience by looking at brain imaging?”

But Gottschall, for one, says naysayers are missing out on something exciting: “Knowing the science behind the movement of a comet through space does not degrade the beauty of the night-time sky.”