Sir Walter Scott’s legacy and the new science of reading

Recent advances in brain science have shown that stories can stimulate the areas of the brain used for real, or ‘online’ perception, to create ‘perceptual simulations’. Combined with the work of cultural historians, these findings are also shedding new light on the literary classics. In this public forum, experts from the Universities of Edinburgh and Strathclyde, and from Scott’s house at Abbotsford, share research on face perception, portraiture and literary descriptions.