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How did Shakespeare know so much about the mind? Started 2025 trying to read a sonnet/scene every day and I'm consistently amazed at how he anticipated so many findings from cognitive science on memory, learning and behaviour. Made some notes🧵⬇️

One idea I've had in my mind for over 20 years now is Harold Bloom's assertion that Shakespeare shaped the modern mind but I don't think I really understood that until I studied memory, cognition and learning.

I'd say the two most perceptive ideas Shakespeare had on this were 1. the constructive and unreliable nature of memory ("remembrance of things past." etc.)

and 2. the idea of cognitive dissonance specifically the notion of paradox and irresolution. This is evident EVERYWHERE in the language (Fair is foul, and foul is fair etc.)

I agree with Bloom that Shakespeare's rendering of human personality has never been bettered. And by the way, for that reason alone he should be studied in school. But he was incredibly perceptive about how the brain learns, remembers, understands and even how it deceives itself.

In Sonnet 59 Shakespeare makes the argument that creativity is nothing really to do with the romanticised idea of conjuring up something new ex-nihilo, but rather something recombinative; in other words the reorganisation, adaptation, and integration of pre-existing knowledge and experiences.

Ausubel's idea of "subsumers" is useful here. The idea that existing, organized knowledge structures in a learner's long-term memory serve as anchors for integrating new information.

Subsumers are concepts, ideas, or frameworks that are already familiar to the learner, providing a foundation for meaningful learning to occur.

In other words, The richer and more organised the subsumers in a learner's mind, the more material they have to creatively adapt, reorganize, and integrate, leading to innovation and insight.

This was always my theory on Lennon/McCartney - they just had an unbelievable amount of songs, chord progressions, melodies etc. in their heads.

Also thought of Koestler's idea of 'bisociation', where creativity arises from the intersection of two previously unrelated domains. (what a brilliant idea btw which needs much more exploration)

"Since mind at first in character was done!" The mind is not an abstract entity but is fundamentally linked to its physical expression/outward manifestation - Reminded here of Lakoff and Johnson and the idea that thought emerges from an organism’s capacity to interact with its environment.

"Look what thy memory cannot contain". Sonnet 77, like so much of his work is concerned with the notion that absence is more powerful than presence. I've always been fascinated with this interaction between forgetting and remembering and found so many resonances of this idea in cognitive science.

For example, the Bjorks' idea of adaptive forgetting: that irrelevant information allows the brain to focus on and prioritise what is meaningful and this is what sonnet 77 is really about: the absence of some memories sharpens our focus on other, more important ones.

As Don Justice notes: "One motive for much if not all art is to keep memorable what deserves to be remembered."

It important to note also that an understanding of the mechanisms of memory is not confined to the cognitive revolution of the 20th Century. In fact, you could argue that people had a better understanding of memory before the 20th Century simply because they had to.

However, for Shakespeare the act of memory acts as a much more important function than merely remembering phone numbers or passing a test, it's a means of keeping the memory of lost loved ones alive.

What I find amazing about Shakespeare is how he anticipated so much of what was discovered centuries later specifically the malleable nature of memory. As Robert Bjork so wonderfully puts it: "using our memories, in effect, alters our memories."